The Bath Fugues

Something had gone terribly wrong. There were no fish in the sea.

On this very fine, very blue morning, in Rim Cove North Queensland, the jellyfish have taken over. That’s what the mini-bus driver told us last night when we arrived at the airport and were shuttled to the resort in the warm and glutinous air. Plastic bags. From the South Pacific to the Andaman Sea. Plastic bags which turtles mistook for jellyfish. So the turtles were all dying, choked by plastic which they swallowed, thinking they were jellyfish, jellyfish which they loved, transparent blubber, neverending ‘hors d’oeuvres’, nourishing protoplasm with a touch of spice, a whole underworld of eating and drinking. Now the turtles have gone and the jellyfish have taken over and the fish are dying, stung with poison, trapped by curtains of tentacles, deprived of fish food. That’s what the mini-bus driver told us in the black night lit only by the lights of the resort, while a tropical mist descended, bringing odours of frangipani. We need guns, the driver said. For the plastic bags? I asked. No, for the pigs. Feral pigs are like jellyfish. Breeding. Destroying the land. Like…he looks around the back of the bus…catches my eye and smiles a sly smile…like them Asian property developers, hey.

But now this bluish morning. A hazy horizon. Something wrong when there was not a single person in sight. Warm already, full of seaweed smells; the raw and the cooked. I hang my Italian sandals around my neck; I wear white flannels rolled. Fine, clean sand squeezes between my toes, cold, hard-packed; softer pockets further up on the small dunes, still cool beneath. Everything groomed by a small tractor which trawls up and down at dawn and sunset. No glass bottles, no trash. The oncoming heat bears with it an anxiety that the day is already lost. Prickles of shells, squeak of soles. Sea pineapples bowl up and back, frothing and rippling. Later in the forenoon I will frequent the marketplace, stroll about, loiter in the shade, lean on doorposts to glean local knowledge. The ‘agora’. With the market crowd, all that matters is my own silence. And then they will tell me everything. I need to buy a lantern. Find an honest man.

Last night I ate alone at the Biarritz Restaurant. Open to the beachfront, windy, warm, with barbecued smells of shrimp and steaks, all you can eat, Queensland style. The restaurant was blurry with smoke, staff in the fug and panic of a small kitchen fire. Busloads of tourists arriving. Confusion is what I cherish. The woman next to me (our tables were small, French style, in a row, along a continuous banquette), appeared professional and busy. Real estate perhaps, but definitely a local. The waiters were obsequious. I may have drunk a little too much. Not much recollection, but I’ll try it in the present, so I can go in and out. The woman next to me has long black hair and intense dark eyes and she catches me glancing to my right, over at her, so I look away at the glistening sea sparkling with…well, glowing sea-critters. I’m not one for too much nature study. I gave that away when I shaved off my beard. Someone else inhabits me now. She eats quickly, studies a pharmaceutical brochure, lifts a long finger for her bill. Pays, slips out the other side of the table. The staff are preoccupied with smoke. I take her money, put the bill on the empty table on my left, leave twenty of her dollars beside my plate and am just about to ease out of the confines of the banquette when I notice she has left a book behind. A leather-bound notebook, black, lying on the red leatherette. I take this to be fortuitous. Red and black are my favourite colours. If stopped by anyone, I could say I was simply chasing after her to return it. It’s a ploy I’ve used before, an exit strategy, though this night I felt happy, adventurous, leaving everything to chance. I carry the book under my arm into the fresh breeze, thinking of the skinny blonde girl I met on the plane, who said she too, was heading for this same resort. I had told her (after several small bottles of airline bubbly) that she was beautiful, and she smiled in a way that was neither embarrassed nor dismissive. I was looking forward to meeting her again by the warm saltwater pool. In the meantime, I sample French champagne from the Honour Bar, which for me bars all honour, as I read the spiked slips which have been turned over for secrecy, and graft onto my honoration of the best wine all the best room numbers.

Clean-shaven, I look much younger than my years. Faces, at any rate, are melting moments. One never sees them entirely, since they change like the weather. In Rio, I thought I recognised many people, all from my past. Ex-lovers, ghosts, maybe. In their new lives they deserve not to be recognised, so I did not approach them. I certainly don’t judge people by their faces. Judgment is acquired from a distance and the face changes as one approaches one’s subject. Tropisms, for instance, occur in the noonday heat. Re-assessments take place after a good meal. Alcoholic vulnerabilities settle in during the late afternoon, when desires or disgust arise. Perspectives are sharpened. It may explain why sane and sober people are often paralysed by unconscious and unclear moods, dulled by emotions with the consistency of jelly.

The shutters in my room emit a smell of The East. Sandalwood, perhaps. I’m not an expert in the varieties of wood. Driftwood more my style; bleached and salted. I think of the skinny blonde. Imagine making love to her, but nothing fits. Roll a little rush of ideas. Light up. This loosening gives me a better grasp. Who was the raven-haired executive next to my table? Inhale. Fold back the covers of her black notebook.

From the Journal of Doctor Judith Sarraute

Something had gone terribly wrong. There were no fish in the sea; not even little reef sharks, which used to nose shoreward at dusk, black shadows darting between clouds of sand.

From my surgery window I can see Janet Cordillion hanging from a parachute, being towed by a powerful speedboat out near the reef. An oil tanker is heading north, spewing smoke. Gosh look at my reflection. My beautiful long black hair turning grey. The gap between Janet Cordillion and the tanker widens very slowly, and the smoke looks like it’s engulfing her. It must be her. She’s para-sailing every morning about eleven, when the wind comes up, with the speedboat driver and his assistant, skiing into the air and when aloft, kicking off her paddles then hovering in the updraft, a weathered eagle; I know the crow’s-feet behind her shades. No idea why she does it; she’s fair, yet deeply tanned, and will get skin cancer. I copy this from my journal onto her patient card. I note that above the card I have also written suicidal – she expressed that to me when she asked for the sleeping pills which I was reluctant to prescribe, but she would have got them anyway from the doctors in Cairns, driving there in her dark green Porsche. I hope she wasn’t storing them up. Janet Coeur de Lion, was how she pronounced her name. Her husband Carter Cordillion is the district’s biggest property developer. He’s running for Parliament. God knows why. It’s not for the money. Somebody will probably shoot him.

A sonic boom from a low-flying aircraft no one can see, shakes the windows. No fish in the sea. At this time of the year the box jellyfish have taken over. Scientists do not know how to exterminate them, so tourists can swim safely all year round without having to don smelly wetsuits. Exterminate. I’m worried about their use of this word. Out here, in the calm, unruffled waters, nature cannot be controlled. Much of my surgery time is engaged with first aid, treating stings by Chironex fleckeri, which can be fatal. Box-jellyfish are cubozoans. Picasso would have loved them. Totally transparent, four-cornered, each corner sprouting up to fifteen tentacles. Three-eyed cubists trailing three metres of deadly poison, fired off through hollow shafts. It’s simply a reaction, on the part of both jellyfish and victim, a kind of neutrality of the sting. No party intends it, for both are in the abyss of a chance encounter with nervous systems. In a more pleasurable and benign sense, it’s like encountering music or painting…initial incomprehension and then the horror of dawning reality, ambushed by surprise and anguish. The pain experienced by the victim usually becomes more intense as time passes and in a few minutes, the heart can stop beating. The common symptoms…lower back pain, muscle cramps, nausea and vomiting…occur within half an hour. A symphony of symptoms. Vinegar, when applied immediately, can slow down the process and alleviate scarring, but it’s not an antidote. There is no known antidote. Ambulancemen bring me marinaded patients, their privates shielded by towels, their faces distorted, arms outstretched like victims of crucifixion. I inject them with analgesics, principally with morphine. Then it’s a balancing act between the dosage and toxic side effects. My whole life has been a balancing act. Judith…my father said to me…you must balance your life and not be like your mother. That was probably during one of his more sober moments. When my father talked with me about my mother, I would run from him and lock myself in my room on the rue Marie Curie in Paris, opposite the laboratories where he did his research in tropical medicine. A Bach fugue playing in the background. Point counterpoint. His hi-fi with six stacked records guaranteeing eternal return. Through the misted windows of his office, I could see him sliding his palms up skirts as though he were palpating an orchid. He liked to kneel, embracing their thighs. In Paris in the nineteen-sixties, it was de rigueur to have two or three mistresses at the same time…if you were a famous professor.

There’s Janet Cordillion descending, rather ungracefully, over the reef. The tanker has disappeared. Her chute folds down on top of her. Let down by men who know the ropes.

Between November and May one should not be in the water. Irukandji syndrome: a slow incapacitation named after a local Aboriginal tribe near Rim Cove. Cramps, difficult breathing, lower back pain, a feeling of impending doom. This last an interesting phenomenon. I’ve had patients who were not stung by the Carukia barnesi, but who experienced impending doom for most of their lives. Patients in Sydney. Walter Gottlieb, for example, who soaked his bread in vinegar and dabbed it onto his lips. It was a peculiar gesture. He rang me just as he’d finished writing the last lines of his manuscript – a moment of triumph which his wife Marie was not there to share…she was in Paris curating a photographic exhibition at the Pitié-Salpêtrière – telling me he had just run a bath…he was depressed, he was saying to me on the phone and he was alone. I alerted his neighbours just in case. They must have knocked for quite some time. It was just moments after his death, his leaden eyes staring up at the gilded mirror on the ceiling.

One should always deal with impending doom intravenously. Morphine, for instance. For years, they treated sting victims by rubbing on vinegar, which had no restorative power, for it was only a temporary salve. Or they bathed the patients in water and wintergreen, which sent them mad with pain, sometimes inducing pulmonary constriction. Besides, baths are enervating and bathing in a tub is not a particularly hygienic form of cleansing.

For years, my father took baths, even during the war. In Paris, we had a giant double-ended roll-top Bateau copper bath with a wood patina finish. Even with such a tub he had to go without soap. There were ersatz products, but he declined using them. His desire for soap was so great he developed an obsession-compulsion. Lack drove him to become a soap fetishist. He always carried a small, genuine cake in his pockets, so his handkerchiefs smelled divine and his hands emitted seductive fragrances when he positioned slides under his microscope. Look at that, he would say, swinging my chair towards the instrument. He breathed into my hair. He carried soap like others carried chocolate; warmed, for personal use. His soap fetishism did not pass onto me, but his concern with lack did, imposing an iron discipline, driving me in my studies so that my medical qualifications were second to none. I still do not bathe in a tub. I shower instead, and there is a plenitude of efficiency there. I could say like my love affairs, but that would be untrue. From my father I inherited the habit of never saying too much, thus cleansing words of their impurities. It’s my soap. That is why I am a doctor and not a novelist. But that may be untruthful. I have a cast of characters, a plinth of notes, grammatical prosthetics made out of necessity: I tell some of my more hopeless cases, old men with fatal prostates, that the word ‘Viagra’ did not possess magical powers, did not even have as much virtue as a good bath. Of course they keep asking for the former.

Sans vie, my father used to say…without life. He was referring to what he was examining, dead microbes, but I rather think he used the term to disapprove of restricted moralities, teetotalism, lack of risk-taking, satisfaction with smallness. For him, death itself was a failure. His excesses were legendary. I guess that’s why I’ve taken on an observer’s role. I have not left the microscope. Smallness is about first things. The first discovery can never be a copy, even if it is a discovery of one thing among many which are still not named. It is the naming that justifies all kinds of primacy. Dr Jack Barnes, for instance, gave his name to the box jellyfish which causes the Barnesi syndrome. I study his findings and read his work deep into the night, refusing a dinner invitation from Carter Cordillion in Port Douglas, even though Carter was hosting the president of Bayer Pharmaceuticals, who was staying at Cordillion’s Temple Meridien resort. Envie…which is not in life, but outside of life…envy is the sad embalming of lack and of desire.

Things slide about. If you place a jellyfish under the hot light of the microscope it liquifies. It has the ability to be transformed into its own medium; the merest illumination and it becomes transparent. Few swimmers have ever seen what stings them. There are people like that. They sting invisibly while they are living their lives, just by living their lives. I try not to imagine the lives of my patients. I note what they have to say and that’s all. Then I make general observations. My father taught me how to assess what is general. All people, he said, fall into categories. They become predictable even when they seem to have unexpected urges. If you imagine them, they become too unique; if you observe them, they do not differentiate too much. Like jellyfish, people too, melt into their own medium.

My surgery is in an old house right alongside the beach on the wilder side of the resort strip. It is reached by a dirt road and sits beneath some palm trees and there is a small lagoon which is washed clean by the high tide every month. The ‘clinic’ as the locals call it, is made of weatherboard and stands beside several double-storey holiday homes which all look out to sea. I have bought one of these modern houses which is linked by a walkway to the surgery. I keep the front room of the old house for my practice. Patients seem to feel calmer when they sit on the old captain’s chair next to my desk and gaze out at the green water. The house creaks like an old boat. I deal mainly with geriatric cases, long-time residents who have seen the waterfront develop and their friends sell up. They come to me to complain about everything. Some amongst them have minor chronic illnesses. The terminal ones are mostly silent. Now and again, the odd tourist who has cut his feet from broken glass, allergies, skin eruptions, will ask advice on real estate. In the summer season, from November to May, I deal mainly with those suffering from the Irukandji syndrome. You can’t tell people not to go near the water. Water is a heavy magnet. There are netted areas for them to swim in, but there will always be a few who will display ignorance or bravado, then they are brought into my clinic whimpering and wheezing and tell me they are dying. My geriatrics in the waiting room cluck their tongues like castanets. They’ve seen it all before. I reach over to my small locked fridge and extract a vial of morphine. My heels click. I do not bend my knees. I used to learn ballet as a child and this habit has stayed with me. My patients are always distracted by what they call my flamenco gestures. I wear a white smock and I keep my toenails painted. Patients come from as far away as Cairns to see me and they don’t mind waiting for hours. I must say, this practice is getting too much for me, but I don’t want a partner. Here I rule. My tunic may look odd, not nearly as professional as a lab coat, but it doubles as a priest’s vestment: a sarrotus. My name might be a challenge for them, but they queue to confess nevertheless. Patient records are stacking up and take up most of the room in my offices at the back of the house. I sometimes take out the files and rearrange them in the order of their seriousness; then I shuffle them randomly. The ones which keep coming to the surface form a critical pathology, a baseline which is continuously varied upon by bad luck and tragedy. But if you remove chance you have an epidemiology. Discourse, you see, spreads. But not yet. Not so fast.

Carter Cordillion has high cholesterol and wants to buy my clinic and my house. In fact, he wants to buy up the whole strip, but no one is selling. We have monthly residents meetings to protect ourselves from surprises. I have another practice in Port Douglas. On weekends I work in tandem with Dr Priscilla Kwan in the heart of the Swordfish Shopping Mall. I intend to cut back. I have floated the idea of change. I want to turn my house into an art gallery. Sick people would no longer be shuffling in and out. At least it would not be a hotel or a restaurant where intoxicated Japanese spill out over the dunes and vomit onto sand.

I have to go now to meet Blixen.

Blixen has flown up from Sydney. Whenever she comes to the resort she stays with me and I always look forward to that. We go shopping, we drive up to the Daintree Rainforest in my open Porsche, we go out to the reef in Carter Cordillion’s cruiser, which he has placed on permanent loan to me during the Irukandji season, for reasons I will not go into here.

My surgery is my observation post. What crosses my line of vision is the grifter who works this area. I’ve seen him several times, here and in Port Douglas and sometimes in Cairns. He looks different on each occasion, but there is the same gaze, the same camera-eye that he employs…sometimes I wonder if he is tracking me. I see him lift the tip money from plates; I see him placing his order of Moët on the room numbers of others. I see him counterfeiting a signature from what is obviously a stolen credit card. He is moderately handsome; moderately nondescript. He is quiet and well behaved, with very pleasant manners.

He crosses in front of my surgery, which is my repair shop. I re-adjust my perspective. Old Pivot is sitting in the captain’s chair, spinning around and around. He is drunk, doesn’t really want to live, but in my company he comes alive. There’s that drifter again, he says. I try to keep Pivot functioning as long as possible. I inject him with vitamins and saline, ensure he is irrigated. I caulk the seams in leaky boats.

You’re a real corker, Carter Cordillion told me when he was drunk. He had on a dark blue shirt and polka-dot braces and he affected a five o’clock shadow looking like the gangster Sol Levine, whose photo appeared in every newspaper at the time… for his drug wars and art thefts…and Cordillion certainly looked like he may have been a dope dealer or an art critic…pushy, anyway. I don’t know what he meant by that remark…a corker. I thought of Levine and heroin. He had his hand on my knee. It was at the Lions Club centenary dinner. A string quartet was playing Brahms. That was when Cordillion made the offer of lending me his cruiser, a powerful boat shaped like a shark with many thousands of horses, as he said. I don’t care for cruisers, with their gurgling throats frothing up the surface of the water. I thought he should have bought a barque; an elegant sailing vessel. I thought of my father’s bateau-bain, his bath shaped like a deep-keeled boat. I thought of Baudelaire and his Invitation au voyage. Bad Baudelaire. I thought of the dripping tap. Gott-lieb; Gott-lieb; it went, into my father’s bathwater, roseate with his blood. I put on my gloves and turned off the tap. I thought of Gottlieb again. Got leave, he used to say to me; out of this world; on leave with Bach; permeable with the element in which he was floating. I could have saved him with love. It was neither accidental nor intentional that I didn’t. I should go back there. Survey what had happened years before. Do some caulking. To sleep. To lie down on deck and sleep, with all one’s clothes on. I always slept with my clothes on. A habit in war-torn countries.

Jellyfish do not survive by learning or by memory. Their reproductive instinct is their perdurance. They multiply out of mimicry, producing polyps shaped like vases or ancient water clocks, from which dozens upon dozens of copies are spawned. They are a culture of copying; an exemplum summum. Composed of ninety-five per cent water, the jellyfish is carried away by its medium, although it does have the capacity to steer through it. A box jellyfish reacts, like most of its species, to light. It may be that it also reacts to colour; the colour red, for example. Perhaps that explains why Janet Cordillion is out there on the reef in her red wetsuit. A tanker is heading down the coast, sending out black smoke.

The fugueur, a person who loses himself or herself in a fugue state, is very much like a jellyfish, carried away by its medium. We no longer use the term fugueur in its romantic and non-pejorative sense. In history, there were many famous fugueurs, Jesus Christ being a notable one. Einstein may have lost himself in flights of fancy when he discovered relativity, as may have Kafka in his parables. Whatever the case, they may lose track of the subject, venture onto sidetracks, only to return, synthesised into a different pattern; but only temporarily, like a kaleidoscope. The same and yet different.

Bach wrote fugues. The important thing about a fugue or ‘flight’ is that all the voices are equal and independent in counterpoint. They are all relative to each other, and in this organised complexity, they speak together, drop out, become fellow travellers, form pairs of dialogues, and in general, mutilate the subject by inverting, augmenting, truncating or copying it.

As with most things difficult and complicated, we label rather than learn from them: phylum: cnidaria; from the group that stings; class: scyphozoa; cup-like. We could say the humble jellyfish has the same qualities as a prophet, divining from a cup and stinging with words. Janet Cordillion certainly thinks so. However with humans, this process of the elevation of the humble is being reversed: prophetic; oracular; bi-polar; obsessivecompulsive; schizophrenic; mentally ill. It is not stretching things too far by saying all Bach’s fugues were gloriously ill; schizophrenic, obsessive-compulsive, bi-polar, oracular, well-organised voices of prophetic intent. Things come round. Speculation is affirmed.

There’s Cordillion’s cruiser pulling away from the jetty with its searchlights blazing. It is not yet dark. The lactic evening disgorges poets. Jellied hallucinations.

I met Marie de Nerval in the hot springs in the Gellert Hotel in the Buda part of Budapest many years ago. She was there, she said, for a cure, though I must say I started smiling at that point. Hot springs cured nothing of course, except perhaps some very minor skin blemishes, or they provided relief for simple or tortured minds. I wouldn’t have said Marie de Nerval was simple-minded, but she certainly was a tortured soul. She was an art dealer and worked at several auction houses and was in Budapest for some rest. In the baths at the Hotel Gellert, we waded round and round clockwise, and then anticlockwise when the attendant blew a whistle…all of us, large and small, mainly round women, all in bathing caps which was de rigueur, though none of us put our heads under the water, afraid of what we would see or ingest. And it was on one of the anticlockwise rounds that Marie de Nerval confided to me, because she always confided in doctors, moreso with female doctors, who were rare in Hungary, at least those in whom you could confide, that she could never have children.

All stories began in hot springs or baths. I believed and vowed never to believe anything said in hot springs. It was only later that I started writing things down, stories told to me by Marie de Nerval, who had become a sort of patient-friend and who consulted me in exchange for advising me on art, which was becoming a growing interest of mine. But I only began to write things down in concealment, under a sort of cachet of client confidentiality, of doctor-patient secrecy. It was Marie de Nerval who first told me about Walter Gottlieb. Walter, having been driven mad from having lost a daughter, was wandering around Europe and China in a demented state, trying to assuage his grief, attempting a grand walking tour, as he called it, in order to stop thinking.

Slide #1: Carukia Gottlieb. Cubozoan.

You see him moving out of the light. He comes forward then disappears into the dark. He doesn’t swim on the surface. There are many perspectives you can take when observing him. I think the most interesting one was a written one; the one in the Common Book belonging to Fabiana Martins. She sold these blank notebooks in her shop in Double Bay, along with dried wildflowers, clocks, hourglasses, barometers, microscopes and telescopes. You know the kind of book I mean: skin-bound, with an elastic strap, with ruled, squared or plain versions, endorsed by the writer Bruce Chatwin when he was jotting things down in Patagonia or Australia. For some reason Fabiana preferred the squared ruling, so that her words were vertically as well as horizontally spaced. I suppose she picked up this fondness for squared pages in Paris where the notebooks originated, or perhaps in Shanghai, where the graph paper suited the formation of Chinese characters. She seemed to have had a fondness for cubic spaces, and Walter Gottlieb’s little room in the university college was just such a space, neatly arranged so that three walls were completely lined with books and the fourth looked out from a casement window onto the courtyard and the playing fields beyond, from where he could observe all the comings and goings of his students. It was said that Walter Gottlieb preferred standing to sitting, and paced around his small room lecturing even when there was no one present…the cleaners had discovered him thus several times…speaking in a loud voice, which he said was a pedagogical conceit, that rhetoric was its own enactment, a form of dramaturgy which authenticated life. Of course Fabiana was just repeating his words, since she was in complete awe of the Master…Maestro, she called him… from the moment she heard one of his lectures on Socrates, which he, as always, at the beginning of each term, insisted on as a prelude to his literature courses. That Fabiana Martins had sought to meet with him in private not once, but several times in his room is well documented, since Gottlieb was Master of a male-only college, and an attractive woman walking into his room in high heels and mini-skirt in the fashion of the times gave cause for rumour, which in a male-only college, tainted Gottlieb with an ambiguous reputation: half heterosexual centaur and half betrayer of gay and aspiring youth. But it seems that Fabiana, having diligently researched Gottlieb’s past as a failed priest and academic, felt a strong urge to confess to him and to seek his advice. She wrote everything down. Gottlieb, of course, never wrote anything down. At least, you never saw him doing it.

You can imagine him moving into and out of the light from his window. He was in the middle of lecturing to no one in particular, speaking in a low voice and then a louder one, as in a dialogue; something about Dante’s circles of hell, and he had on an academic gown, you know the kind, lined with ermine, even though the day was fairly warm, and he turned to you midsentence, having invited you into his room without addressing you until now, and said that if all punishment matched the guilt…and since he had no appetite for life until now, having been brought to the ultimate stage of man’s weariness, Weltschmerz…then what was he guilty of if not of a kind of original sin…why had he been persecuted thus? Fabiana turned on her heels, believing from what he said that she had suddenly been scorned as a temptress, sent to torment him as some college prank, but he placed his fingers lightly on her arm and detained her. She had brought him a present: a notebook with squared paper.

You can imagine him moving back into the darkness of his shelves, where sat ancient volumes in their uniform of dull gold lettering. That was when she fell in love with him, something so deep, beyond obsession. Several meetings later, Fabiana sat on his bed and told him about her marriage: how she had been seduced by a man who owned property; how she needed security and money; that she was on the verge of having to sell her grandmother’s art collection. Roger was a tradesman, a parquetier, and he paid off her debts, gave her a gold credit card linked to his account for her birthday, bought her a small apartment and a baby grand piano beside a bay window. Nothing could have been more ideal, when she entered the front drive on the weekends, the car loaded with dresses and ornaments, the air smelling of moist hay, to know that he was out in the paddocks on his tractor, all the home fires alight for her. A double life. There was companionship but no love. It’s how we waste others. We do not know the moment when love turns to hatred under such benign circumstances. We do not know the moment because we have taken on the original sin of choosing life above fidelity, which inevitably involves suffering. He knew she was having an affair. He spent more time on his tractor. Until he couldn’t anymore. He stormed in one day when she was on the phone. You’re just an old cunt! he shouted. She ate blood oranges all night, simpering in the spare room while her skin glowed. In front of her mirror she asked what it was that must have disgusted him.

Some music, she said, saddened you immeasurably, and she was saddened for no good reason, and the yearning did not cease and she returned to her music, just to sample the sorrow. There was no music in Roger, Fabiana said, and she had never quite realised what a gap this would be, a lack which was, as she put it, in the composition of blood. And this was an indication that she was on the right track, that this incompatibility would become an attrition of their relationship and that she would have to leave him sooner or later. He drove his tractor; ploughed further afield. He could not express himself in any other way.

When he went out to fight the fire on the property at Putty, she left for Sydney, frightened of him, she said, whose generosity was matched by equally selfish and violent expectations of wifely duties. She was through, she exclaimed to Walter Gottlieb, with home duties. It was at this point that Gottlieb placed his hand upon her silken knee. You are very lonely and lovely my child, he said, and then with a Tennysonian flourish, added: ‘more beautiful than day’ and he began to stroke her hair, which was fine, like goose down. Her face was half in darkness when she told him they had never found Roger’s body. The fire had exploded in the pine forest where he had towed the trailer with the large watertank on board. They found the truck overturned and charred, but there was no evidence of any human remains. Then she told Walter Gottlieb something that he would carry to his grave.

It’s the fourth corner that makes a cubozoan jellyfish. Gottlieb found himself stung with passion. It was tortuous when she left that evening, her perfume on his academic gown, the fragrance of her kisses on his brow. He had succumbed to what Thomas Mann called the late adventure of the feelings. He ploughed a furrow walking on the football field that night, lecturing through the fizzing voltage of cicadas. The next morning he wrote a letter to the Vatican, asking to be released from his vows. He was still wearing his cloak, which was pinned with dead fireflies.

My living quarters are behind my surgery. The side facing the sea is glassed in, so that light can flood the open-plan living area. Even the bathroom and bedroom appear to sail out to the horizon. I had the architects design this floor as a replica of the Mies Van der Rohe Tugendhat house, using what they called ‘smart-glass’, which is one-way and can be lightened and darkened manually or automatically with control filters…like the lens of a microscope. When I look out from my shower, I can see waves in the distance, breaking on the reef. Boom! I suppose that’s what it would sound like. Now and again there’s a fastmoving speck, not a bird, but a military jet fighter. Boom! Mid-point, just this side of the reef, I often watch Janet Cordillion hanging from her dragon-winged para-sail. Swivel past her and you can see the coastal tanker at eleven o’clock. Directly to the left of the surgery, on an outcrop called The Peninsula, is the Cordillion estate, a white stucco mansion built like a Mexican hacienda, totally out of keeping with the Australian environment. This triangulation between Chinese kite, Acapulco estate and the modernist repair shop of my surgery counters any hint of transcendence or of any assured culture. Here, on this stretch of coast, there is no nostalgia for history or for aesthetic absolutes. Perhaps this is a good thing…that in this country, we copy without understanding. How terrifying therefore, even to know history!

The Romans understood how false time could be. They used words like fama and fata. Fama was storytelling and selfpromotion, instant fame, man-made; no other evil was swifter because it acted upon the present but was nourished by rumour; a grand illusion. Fata, however, was one’s fate, the future which ‘explained’ the past. Fata was enduring time. It had legitimacy. The afterword. The gods had decreed it all along. It was hindsight as foresight; a divine prolepsis. It all depended on the time of speaking; on perspective, on the calibration of the sundial, or the dripping of the clepsydra. In the end, these measures were still man-made. Divination was artisanal; and because it was humble craftsmanship to build such instruments, stonemasons were always reflective and saturnine. Obituarists.

I meet Blixen Gottlieb in the lobby bar of the Temple Meridien resort. I sit next to the stone fountain, which features twin mermaids. The air is moist and cool. There she is, looking a little dishevelled but smiling fresh-faced, her blonde hair in a ponytail. She is twenty-four today and when I hug her I feel her fragility. We do not speak for a little while. Tonight we will dine at the Rastoni, where they have a seafood carbonara that eliminates everything else from the menu.

When Blixen stays with me she always remarks about the weather; not in any ordinary sense, not in the phatic way most people speak about the weather or the climate. Blixen sets free her ponytail and then refashions it expertly into a small chignon pinned with a tortoiseshell comb. She observes that it practically never drizzles or rains for a prolonged period here in the tropics. There is the afternoon storm which is irregular, and a night rain which lasts less than an hour. It suits me, Blixen said. These are my reasons to be happy. In the year that Father died it rained for three months. Blixen has not really gotten over her father’s death. Not like me, who practically forgot my father’s disappearance in the space of a year. My father, the great Professeur, le docteur Émile Sarraute, achieved his fata. He is there on all the plaques, crowned with laurels, in the science buildings in Paris. Intaglios and imbroglios. Blixen does not speak much about her father. Walter Gottlieb, it seemed, had achieved very little at the time of his sudden death, there in the bathroom of his wife’s Double Bay mansion, a vial of morphine in his hand, which I had to pry loose as rigor mortis had already manifested itself (Marie was away in London and Blixen was in boarding school), before I could write my report. It was raining, I had noted… though this seems strangely irrelevant and it was not usual for me to note such extraneous circumstances, I detest formless interventions, lyricism, irrelevant conjunctions conjured up simply to paint a scene…though Blixen’s comment about the rain, made as she stretched her shapely legs out over my balcony while replacing the sunglasses she had on over her forehead… forged an uncanny connection with the autopsy report. Gottlieb’s body was still dripping when I arrived. I smelled a woman’s perfume in the bedroom. Something French. Blixen suggested, half-jokingly, that I turn the Rastoni restaurant (which wasn’t doing much for me I admit), into an art gallery. I listened with interest. There are enough restaurants in the resort, she said.

The Irukandji jellyfish eats and excretes through the same aperture. I am not a great eater. I’ve always preferred small, meagre dishes to large Queensland-style meals. I do not like places which display signs that say: All you can eat. I’m more inclined towards emaciation. I had never really wanted a partnership in the Rastoni restaurant. It was Carter Cordillion who made me the offer; a rather generous one. Carter would like to get me into his bed, but not while Janet was alive. The thing though, about the Irukandji jellyfish, is that it has three eyes. It sees things differently; so much so I thought the art gallery a good idea.

Grifting

The dark one and the blonde one. It was the dark one who left her diary on the banquette. I’m not returning it now…that would mean I had probably read it…besides, identifying myself is not something I do, and the blonde one will recognise me. I wear nondescript clothes…blue jeans, loafers, pastel shirts. I always wear different glasses, sunglasses, reading glasses, mirror shades. Sometimes I shave, sometimes I sport a light beard. I practise walking with a stoop, limping a little, walking straight-backed like an army colonel, briskly, effortlessly sliding over seats, easing out of doors. Absent-minded eccentricity is my greatest cover. I never feel that I will be caught, in order to preserve, as naturally as possible, a demeanour of affronted self-respect when the moment occurs. If challenged, I always distractedly produce authentic credit cards or sometimes I even pay in cash.

Grifter/grafter: a sneak thief. Not a polite etymology, since some believe the word ‘graft’ comes from the word ‘job’, meaning excrescence. I agree. I blame my truncated education. Not a great one: waiter/barman; barman/waiter. At least I know the workings of hotels. I know jobs. When the chambermaid, for example, is in the bedroom, she always turns on the TV. Making beds can be monotonous. No one can hear anything when Oprah Winfrey is on. When the maid does the bathroom, I scan for briefcases and watches. In corridors, during mini-bar replenishments, I pick off whisky and cognac from the drinks trolley. I make sure I go up and down the lifts a few times so the staff recognise me. I fiddle with plastic room cards if confronted, complain about demagnetised strips. I never go onto a floor if I hear a walkie-talkie. Fire-escapes are the best exits. Sometimes you can be lucky. The early-bird checkout will drop his card into a slot in the concierge’s desk. You ring the concierge from an in-house phone – you need him now, you’re maintenance and the lift door is stuck. Collect the card from behind the slot. Sometimes they forget to wipe the code for the next guest. Sometimes you can only break into the gym or the poolside deck…where you can have brunch on the same room tab. Now and again I ring for a late checkout, queue for lunch, study the room carefully, go to the toilet when the buffet is crowded and slip out, walking briskly, heading for free drinks at the next gallery opening; canapés at a book launch; unbadged convention dinners.

I was attracted to the blonde one on the plane. Now I’m rather interested in the dark one; the older woman. They are so happy to see one another they don’t notice I’m listening in. Sometimes you can find out where they’re staying. But I’m not getting much from this conversation. I pull out her diary which I’ve re-covered in brown paper, try to match the voice to the writing.

Blixen is in her last year in medical school and I’m trying to talk her out of going onto an internship where she’ll work double time for no money, learning on the job to do what I did for twenty years, a jack-of-all-trades, prescribing drugs, delivering babies, cleaning out pus, suturing wounds, picking out glass, giving myself regular hepatitis shots, tetanus shots, flu shots, looking down throats and up anuses. You’ve got to be dedicated to people, I said. It would be better to specialise. Why didn’t you, Jude? Blixen asked. Because…well…you know the answer. Blixen nodded. Your father the specialist. No, the researcher. He wasn’t interested in people. A doctor? he used to ask, who wants to be a doctor? You think I want a dingy practice in Pigalle peering at penises or breathing the foetid exhalations of old crones? Have patients steal my ether for personal sniffing, hear them snivelling behind doors, pushing their children forward onto my knees, kids whose bums are seething with worms, their noses oozing, while I listen to their hacking coughs and catch their spew in a basin? You think that is heroic?

You see how I was not interested in his rhetoric. Words should cleanse, not sully. It was those ready-made phrases which came out of him so easily which pushed me in the opposite direction. Words are physicians of the mind…Aeschylus. Don’t quote Aeschylus to me please, Blixen said, and I saw that she was disturbed by what I was saying. Her father had quoted Aeschylus to her: how words should dissect, fumigate, sterilise the physical loathsomeness of sin. He made everybody heroic, Blixen said, speaking of Walter Gottlieb her father, so much so that his book was a tribute…the whole thing a tribute to failure, Blixen said, and all you speak of is success, the success of art, the success of business…

I thought Blixen was going to cry. I thought I had touched a raw nerve, but I am always doing this to people I think are worthy of being touched. Rastoni’s was filling up. I ordered the seafood carbonara, the Stella Maris water, the Lacrima Christi del Vesuvio 2001. Gastronomy mimicked religion and anticipated medical methods. Surgery, after all, is not only a cutting up of sacrificial victims…you learn from observing pork butchers how to put it all back again, festively, in the window. Your father wrote his book whilst suffering a fugue, I said, just to change the subject. Blixen sighed and looked away. Her eyes were glassy. I tried to fill the awkward silence which followed. It now seems to me he intended it to be read only after his death. He spoke as a dead man, Blixen murmured…out of time, about things which the living couldn’t recognise. My father tore up his manuscript you know, and then pasted fragments of it together. Reading him was like…I don’t know…reading a history of wounds. His publisher did well editing and marketing it. Yes, I said. Then came Jason Redvers’ hatchet job.

There I go opening up wounds. I didn’t mean it. I didn’t mean to stir up Blixen’s painful memories of how Redvers’ book came out just before Gottlieb’s novel…the former consisting of allegories of the master stealing from the student, the professor filching stories from the acolyte. It tarnished a good novel, I said, trying to compensate for my mistake, and that publisher of his… Blonsky?…Kapuszinsky? Brezinsky, Blixen added helpfully, yes, Brezinsky the libel lawyer, I said, would have known how to turn an allegory into a claim…the plague of plagiarism, or some such thing.

I stopped there. I didn’t want to hurt Blixen anymore by getting into such a conversation. There’s that pale drifter again. I’ve seen him lifting the tips from tables. He thinks he’s not being observed, but I watch the back of his head reflected in the mirror on the Rastoni wall, beside the photograph of Ernest Hemingway and a huge swordfish.

Blixen gets distracted, in the same way her father used to be sidetracked by mirrors. She peers through a kaleidoscope, not a microscope. Then again a kaleidoscope is not that distant from a microscope. While she allows fragments to fall into place differently each time, serendipitously, my micrological procedure isn’t any more objective than hers. I frame a particle of jellyfish to search for its thickness and it melts away from the light to reform differently. New worlds come to life under illumination. Reconstituting and repairing. But first I have to slice through the jelly. Surgery as sculpture. What looks disfigured in its everyday impenetrability, appears properly ordered from another point of view. I am far more aggressive than Blixen, and I sometimes wonder if I have lost my life for having no romance. Take the Chironex fleckeri box jellyfish, which was thought to be the most common jellyfish around here, locally known as the sea wasp or sea stinger. This venomous creature was known as Chiropsalmus quadrigatus, from which the common name ‘quadie’ was derived. But this is not the same as Carukia barnesi, which is far more lethal. True, the latter is a cubozoan, like the ‘quadie’, but such single-minded, single-eyed obsession over having four sides may be limiting. I squint but I don’t see where the two animals have diverged. I only see my patient record cards, my ordered laboratory and shelves of drugs, my victims in their vinegar bath. Jellyfish deserve more poetry, more than my quadratic field.

Blixen is far less restricted. She has her colourful kaleidoscope: her gorgeous body; her childhood memories; her innocent personality; her heroes and heroines. The first principle of wooing is to make oneself sevenfold, wrote Walter Benjamin.

I’m busy treating Mickey Jones for burns. He’s old and his hand is blistered from trying to douse his flaming barbeque with brandy. He’s of the old school, a Francophile, wears a beret, but has never travelled overseas. He relives the First World War although he wasn’t even born then. He comes to see me because he says French women speak beautifully and they give him a hard-on, although he no longer remembers how that felt. I change the bandage on his hand with care. I do this tenderly, more tenderly than usual. Perhaps it’s because Blixen is working as my nurse, observing everything I do.

When we have a free moment between patients, I speak to her of my art gallery idea. I’m feeling flippant and I tell her I’m going to call it The Museum of Forgery. After all, no one knows what I’m going to put in it. World-famous reproductions, perhaps. Oh yes, I do, Blixen says, and kisses me on the neck while I look out to sea and observe Janet Cordillion, finally aloft after several failed attempts. I’m going to call it the Galerie Kahnweiler, after the gallery which used to be at the end of my street in Paris, I tell her.

It was mid-afternoon when the first sting patient of the season was brought in. A boy of about fourteen, of Middle-Eastern background, his mother beside herself with worry, pulling at her chalabi, not having been warned that Australia was full of venomous creatures which you could hardly see, full of danger signs in a language few who come from distant cultures could read, full of words just as deadly when unseen. Her jewellery flashed beneath. The boy was sweating, his arms and legs in severe cramp, moaning with every intake of breath, his voice trembling. I asked Blixen and his mother to restrain him from touching the stings. He’s shouting in Arabic now, and his mother embarrassed, apologises. We smile, shake our heads, it’s okay, we do not know the words. I draw a hypodermic and he is silenced. Normally, I would inject a dose of Fentanyl – with no known neurotoxicity; but there is a new drug on the market. I ask his mother if he is allergic to sheep, to sheep products. No? Then 2 ml of Parenteral injected slowly into a vein perhaps; no, I think 6 ml injected slowly into a muscle; his suffering finally punctured. The results are good. Before day’s end they’ve brought in three more cases. Jellyfish are being washed up on the beach, nematocysts discharging into those who swept upon them unwarily.

Blixen and I open a champagne. Let’s hope there are no night swimmers. They’ve set up arc lights on the beach, hammered in warning signs. They do not know that light attracts jellyfish, which are most numerous eight to ten days after a full moon, their canopies extending so they rise further up to the surface of the water. But you can’t tell functionaries to turn off their lights. It’s a matter of public safety, they will say. Times are such that everything is a drama, an emergency…it’s an obsession with flashing lights and sirens. No one reflects on the idea of plagues, of epidemics as having biblical precedence, cyclical occurrences, wheels within wheels. No one reads the implications of why terror comes from not knowing life’s reproductions. Why do we name a species of jellyfish, the scyphozoa, the Medusa, for instance? Formerly a beautiful virgin whose gaze could turn men to stone, Medusa slept with Poseidon, the god of the sea, in Athena’s temple. Athena was livid with rage and transformed Medusa’s hair into live snakes. She was hydra-headed. If one serpent was killed, another sprang up in its place. It was a ghastly reproduction of beauty. Medusa was the victim in the end…because she was once seductive. One sample is intriguing. A million is an invasion. For that, people have been exterminated.

Look at Blixen. Her mind inseparable from her body. She watches television in order to spot our little beach on the news. Your great-grandmother, I began, speaking over the voice-over on the screen, came up here for holidays. Mmm, she said, drawing up her legs under her in the way little girls did, then stretching out a hand began to stroke my hair, that white lick which has persisted in my coiffure since early adolescence, something I put down to my father’s experimentation, a vial of peroxide or something more evil. I breathe with difficulty upon another’s touch. I never knew my great-grandmother, Blixen yawned. Her chest filled like an hourglass and suddenly Blixen appeared like her great-grandmother Julia Grace.

I’m tired of patients, Blixen said. Others are too much in me. I recognised this last statement. It was a complaint heard often in my surgery. Patients who had suffered some mental breakdown. Too many voices in the head. Too much for the system. After all, Blixen was a twin of a dead twin. She lost Blimunde, half of herself, at the age of five. Drowned in her father’s pool. But I don’t need to go into all that. All the business of Fabiana’s psychosis. The history of her breakdowns, the way she lived several lives; city lives, country lives; how she always returned from the city looking for respite from all those people inside her. Before they were settled with their father, the twins alternated between the flat in Potts Point, the shop in Double Bay and the farm at Putty. Roger, her husband, enjoyed having the twins on his lap, showing them the burrs he had picked out of his lumberjacket, making sheep noises. But I think he grew tired of Fabiana’s absences. She would just get up and leave him there; she would go missing days at a time. He suspected it was a sort of concubinage in reverse. She sojourned in several houses. He didn’t know, when he married her under that big almond tree behind the big house at Putty, that she had this fracture in her. He didn’t know she was quite incapable of raising children normally, having dragged them in a pram from flat to flat in Kings Cross, neglecting to pay her bills, her electricity supply cut off. When she bought a car, she drifted off while driving and rammed several vehicles outside the Conservatorium of Music and a wheel came loose and bounced into the Botanical Gardens, knocking over a fertility monument shaped like a breast. The police found two babies in a large cardboard box on the floor of the back seat. Roger didn’t know about that because her friends hushed it up. Nor did he know that her neighbours had tried to help her and that she had accused them of interference, screaming obscenities while she threw bottles at them as they rang the child-welfare authority. After they had been married a month, she and Roger began quarrelling virtually every day. It was the result of a mixture of alcohol and provocation; seduction and jealousy. Minor squabbles turned into suicidal odysseys, and once he had to rescue her from a cheap motel in Darwin, where she had been held captive by a complete stranger. The police were not called on that occasion. He hadn’t researched her past carefully enough. Otherwise, he would have found that it was stubbornness, it was pride, it was the injustice of it all…that she had not been gifted with the maniacal discipline of a great artist.

It was equally unfair for Walter Gottlieb. He had just left the priesthood. He had little money. He had to marry Marie de Nerval to convince the authorities of legal custody. He just had to make it work. And then on a cloudy day, with his friend Redvers sunk in a fugue by the side of the pool, Blimunde had floated out of her inflated angel wings and had found bottom. I found Gottlieb’s notes beside his bath.

From the notebooks of Walter Gottlieb

The sixteenth-century mind was not the same as ours. There was a lot more doubt. A lot more superstition and speculation. In comparison, we are quite uninventive. We fear failure. We adopt received opinions, sitting in our cages constructed by others. We live for them. We speak their inanities, just to make noises. We no longer ruminate like Montaigne, who described his breath as ‘excremental’, pushing out only digested thoughts. As Redvers used to say, even shit could be philosophy. On his deathbed, Montaigne’s remaining moments contained a dialogue with imaginary servants as he clung to the social meaning of dying together (‘commourans’ was the word he used), under the seductions of sleep. Meet me at the next tavern, he said, I have never succeeded in keeping some part of me from always wandering. He didn’t mean a smoky chamber at the inn. He wanted to be in a convenient part of the house. Nowhere moreso than in the bathroom, being bathed in brine for his ulcerations. In the sixteenth century, hot baths were said to have caused madness by overheating the liver and putrefying the humours. It was observed how flowers wilted when placed in a hot tub. These observations were noted down in flowery figures of speech, excessive in their encouragement of tepidness and moderation. The bath, apparently, was morbid. It provoked thoughts about death. For Montaigne, it had a familiar feel. He was a melancholic.

He always referred to his friend Booty, or Étienne de La Boétie, as La Boitie, unconsciously associating a limp (boiterie) with a lure (boête). Booty suffered from terminal melancholy, which Montaigne was trying to avoid without success. Booty lived under the sign of saturn. In a Zürich library I once came across this illustration. It’s a portrait of Jason Redvers…I’ve seen him naked, asleep on my lawn. He may be holding a crutch, or the handlebars of his bicycle. He’s just lopped off desire with that sickle.

A dialogue and a phone call I found Blixen in the bath. It was a bright blue morning and no tourists were walking on the sand outside, no one stepping between the mounds of jelly. The beach was deserted and the jetty was devoid of cormorants. No one was fishing. I heard voices, and at first they seemed to be coming from an open window, but it was Blixen in the bath. I knocked and went in. She said she was exorcising ghosts. Exercising? She smiled and then I saw that she was in tears. She tried to hide her face in a washcloth. I took it from her gently and scrubbed her back. She was better then. I said the bath was not a good place to be on one’s own. This was the wrong thing to have uttered. I’m going to leave soon, Blixen said.

I try not to speculate. When I observe, I am silent. When I speculate, I always say the wrong thing. I do not know how to fill the silence while waiting for fragments in the kaleidoscope to fall into place. For Blixen, this silence is a condemnation. In the sixteenth century it would have been accepted as a form of skepsis. A dignified doubt which served coherence and unity. I am not one for soothing words when there is no intellectual solution which justifies them. Your father always walked with a slight limp, I said to Blixen. I asked him about it several times when he came into my Double Bay surgery for his blood-pressure tablets, his Prozac, his Viagra.

You lie back in the bath while I place a hot towel behind your head.

It was not a real limp, you finally said. He zigzagged all over Portugal with that lurching gait. Doing research. I’ve shown you his notebooks.

Montaigne also walked with a limp, I said. Perhaps it was from falling off his horse, but I rather doubt whether it was a real physical disability. Baudelaire, I believe, walked erratically, bobbing and weaving.

Yes, I know, you said. Redvers had written about it too. I don’t know if any of it was true. He was a piss-taker. I used to see him shaking himself on the lawn at midnight. He was probably making fun of Daddy. Redvers always scorned hospitality, and to urinate on Daddy’s million-dollar lawn was employing his own freedom of expression.

I don’t think so, I said. Redvers had a prostate problem which was going to kill him. The boot was on the other foot. Come to think of it, they were both aware of their mortality. Montaigne wrote of his love for cripples because they resisted being dragged along by the current. Erasmus declared that since Amazons crippled their future studs, it was crippled men, not crippled women, who were more sexually desirable. If that’s an affectation, it’s a positive one for me nevertheless. Friends, after all, were crutches for all kinds of repression.

This argument of mine was unconvincing. I noticed you frowned. You hold your breath and slide for a moment under the water. I know this moment of yours. See nothing, hear nothing. You rise, blowing like a seal. Why do you hate baths? you ask. They are so purifying.

It’s good to attend to yourself, I said to Blixen. Then I left the bathroom. I did not mean to upset her. I did not mean to imply her father had been unethical, faking an intellectual limp to cover his tracks. Those who do not attend to their being are ready for a fall. I know Blixen is half Blimunde and she is not always in control. She has bath fugues. You cannot drown in a bath unless drunk or drugged; given over completely. After our talk, Blixen now bathes in private and she has locked the door.

I’m in two minds about locks on bathroom doors. Builders install them as a matter of course, though the number of deaths in bathrooms should be a warning to us all: Jim Morrison – heart attack in his suds; Keith Relf – electrocuted while flaying his Fender in the tub; Catherine the Great never emerged from her visit – she was pushing at the door the wrong way when she had a stroke; Claude François – the teen idol with the sequined suits who sang My Way – Clo-Clo, as he was known – electrocuted himself in the bath while standing up to change a light bulb. I am totally against cheap hotels. Then again, if Marat had had a lock on his bathroom door, Charlotte Corday would not have been able to stab him to death. And despite W. H. Auden’s public praise of Man’s private bath – his Encomium Balneae, as a site of Edenic and carnal pleasure with a lock on the inside – it was the unlocked door which saved Carter Cordillion.

Carter Cordillion was frantic when I received his phone call last April. He sounded really desperate, and was in a great panic. Please come right away, he pleaded. My place. Break down the bathroom door if you have to; the neighbours aren’t home. I wasn’t going to do this without further information. It occurred to me from the sound of his voice that this was not a joke or ploy to get me into his bathroom. Can you tell me what the problem is? I asked. No. He could not. Something intimate had gone terribly wrong. Could I please come now? It would be your duty of care, he said. A failure of care, he insisted. Why don’t you call the ambulance? I asked. As I said, he shouted, it’s intimate! Johnny Smee…he’s my mechanic…his brother’s the town paramedic. I can’t call them. Can you hurry?

I drove over to the hacienda. His palm trees had dislodged some of their green coconuts. The red gravel on the drive was bright. The red tiles on the roof were too bright. The red brick path blinded me. I put on my sunglasses. Knocked on the front door. No one. I opened the door. Carter? I called. I heard a grunt. Judith! he yelled. Upstairs. Quickly. I walked up the sweeping stairs slowly. It was not a moment in which to be surprised. I did not want him appearing naked or in a towel, his gold chain around his neck, complaining about his gout or water in his ear. In the bathroom! He was struggling. In some pain. And there he was in the huge spa bath lying on his side with his head lolling above the oily water. I’ve got a lemon up my arse. What? I’ve pushed a lemon up my bum, he gasped. It’s stuck… all the way in. Hurting like mad. I helped him up. Hauled him over the edge of the tub. He was a big man and he used all the strength he had in his arms, but his legs were like jelly. I placed a few towels under him. His splayed legs were hairy. For an instant I thought of Montaigne, who contrasted the size of his imagination with his scanty penis. Mentula minuta. Carter had never shown much imagination, but now I was rethinking that. Pain shrivels. I searched in my bag and gave him a shot of muscle relaxant. Put on my gloves and fished out the lemon. I did not ask what he was doing with it up there. He looked immensely relieved. He smiled inanely and begged me not to tell anyone. Then he recovered himself and added that of course I would not tell; I was bound by professional ethics. I let myself out of his house. When I arrived back at the surgery I took a long time cleaning my arms with Hibiclens, removing all the bath oil, continuing my dialogue with Blixen, only the bathroom was empty and she was gone. The house was as bleak as the weekend ahead. There were no fish in the sea. I made myself a gin and tonic. No; no lemon.

12

It’s official, now listed as an ‘epidemic’, though the word really means a disease prevalent among a people, which has entered them from an outside locality. The word ‘plague’ is perhaps closer to the truth. Mounds of jellyfish have been washed up on the sand, now being cleared away by bobcats, pushed into pits and then covered over. Come look at this.

Slide #2: Carybdea Rastoni

This little creature is called the ‘Jimble’. It’s not deadly, though it can cause a weal on the skin…see how vinegar inhibits the discharge. Now watch as I apply methylated spirits…all the nematocysts are firing. The sound of firing and the smell of methylated spirits. 1943. My father doggedly continued with his experiments throughout the war, his smell the odour of ether and methylated spirits. He married my mother smelling like that in the church at Montmartre, and all the time the firing, now close, now far away, and while they were going home in the métro a Jewish woman threw herself in front of the train and workers had to drag out her body, my father placing a handkerchief soaked in ether over my mother’s nose so she could be led drowsily back through the streets and later, much later, long after the war, he told me she would never have survived even though he had married her, because her memories would have caught up with her in the end, but while all the firing was going on, they enjoyed a rather bourgeois life, despite the rationing, going down to the little restaurant at the corner of the rue de Vaugirard and the boulevard du Montparnasse, sipping minestrone, and all she could hear was the crackling which she thought was distant gunfire but which turned out to be the backfiring of trucks as they came speeding down towards the Seine, turning eastwards with 8000 Jews being deported to work camps, where they would later be pushed into pits and then covered over, my mother gripping the edge of the white linen tablecloth as she listened for the trucks, my mother who had a morphine habit on account of her guilt, on account of surviving by imposture, a Jewish woman married to a Catholic man who was a well-known specialist in human skin diseases, who kept morphine liberally stored in a cool meat safe, and there was my mother finally, stretched out on the table at the morgue when they had fished her out of the Seine… it was ten years since the end of the war…her dress over her head, and my father was shouting to the attendant to shut the door through which I was peering, and the door was pushed so hard it slammed onto my nose, tears of pain welling up into my eyes though it was not the same pain as that which lay in my chest as I watched my father bathing with his mistresses in his apartment, pouring champagne taché into the water, the women giggling with fleshy stupidity and shameless ignorance, when I saw through the keyhole with one eye what it was like to be enslaved to desire.

13

The condition of awareness is sensitivity to form, I said to Blixen as we drove up into the Daintree Rainforest to get away from the volume of patients. Blixen enjoyed herself that afternoon, hopping over the huge boulders in the river. Parrots swooped at great speed through trees, leaving just a dab of colour behind. Riverine birds, less colourful, dipped and swung up to misty peaks and the roaring and gushing of water drowned out conversation. On the other bank some Indigenous people…you didn’t see them at first until you glimpsed the red of their bandanas…were drinking the day away since no one paid them as guides anymore, and they drank to the reality of their rockspirits haunting the places from which the unaware would fall, deep into the ravine, for having violated the laws of form.

Julia Grace violated the laws of form. Some of the letters between her and the poet Camilo Conceição have survived. You could have said she expressed too strong a desire for the cloudy lack of perspective in some of the Chinese paintings that he possessed, where distance was not accounted for, where mountains met the dimensions of prophets, and women, suspended midair, sailed in their silks over deadly gorges. Instead, Julia Grace said she did not think such paintings had much value. They were talked up in catalogues, she said. They didn’t subscribe to the principle of originality. What was certain was that a shipment of them had arrived at the Grace property a few months after she had returned home from France. She had borne a child by then, a daughter to whom she would point out stars in the huge night sky. They would mark out Venus and then Mars and Julia would map with her finger the arcades in Sintra where a swan had once settled upon her lap.

Blixen, fixing a stare upon the roaring waters, said that she would like to give them to me as a gift. But a gift was always tainted with debt. Best to give a gift away. Friendship rested on divestment, not investment. Further surgery on the idea was needed, I said to her. I could see she was disappointed with my response, but the murky world in which these artworks had come into her possession through the coincidence of Fabiana’s disappearance overseas was not where I wanted to go. Besides, I didn’t wish to take possession of anything that was tainted with ancestral tragedy. God knows, I’ve already seen part of the Barringila collection from Putty which had been brought to Walter Gottlieb’s place at Double Bay and I had recognised some of Jason Redvers’ works among the Chinese collection, paintings he was forging in Milan in the late sixties, massproducing Francis Bacons with sales going to the Red Brigades. When Bacon moved studios he abandoned quite a few canvases, simply because they were too awkward to push through the narrow doors. He encouraged friends, poor artists, squatters, itinerants, to paint over them. One could come into possession of a genuine Francis Bacon beneath the top coat, just as one could come across a genuine Ma Yüan beneath one of the Conceição restorations. One could also buy an inane despoliation. I sat for him once, I said to Blixen. No, not for Bacon, but for Redvers. The result was not a fake and it wasn’t badly done either. He even signed the back of it Justine de Reviers, no doubt making fun of the way I’d always got his name wrong. I wonder if he knew that the infirmary at Auschwitz was called the Revier. You expected to die upon entering it. My mother would have preferred to expire there, perhaps would have willed it to arrive sooner, exhausted from her hard labour, making the most of a bed and a blanket with less lice. That’s where she would have given birth to me in May 1944. That’s where they did some experiments, coating newborn babies in lard and leaving them in the snow, timing their survival and their liquidation. One or two out of a hundred survived. Those who did, saved their mothers as well. All were given lukewarm baths in the Revier, their mothers set to work carrying crates of bottles containing blood, and then the same bottles containing a colourless liquid. There were potted plants in the corridors; tiny saplings.
On the morning of the 25th of September 1940, at the border between Vichy France and Fascist Spain, the philosopher Walter Benjamin rested his head on his briefcase beneath an almond sapling. There was a warm westerly wind. Benjamin had less than twenty-four hours to live. Walter Gottlieb found that almond tree, fully grown, laden with nuts, at Port Bou. He told me that when he sat beneath it, he could recall someone else’s memories. He said: If you listen closely, you can actually hear the other’s recollection, gathering like a swarm of grasshoppers on a midsummer’s evening. This habit of sitting under trees may have been his refuge from his wife Marie de Nerval. But the susurration of grasshoppers – for that was the sound Fabiana was making beside him that fateful night when Marie was in Paris, the sound of Fabiana removing her skirt and her stockings, the sound of her climbing on top of him in his marriage bed – signalled a plague. He was losing his mind; losing himself to desire’s swarms. Gottlieb, I said, could not have been a Jewish name. God, after all, could never be named. Blixen ducked under the water. She was beneath the suds a long time. Then she rose and I handed her a towel. Not in Hebrew, she said. But it’s possible in German. The real family name, she said, was Goldberg.

So Walter Goldberg made his way to his bathroom at one in the morning after Fabiana had left, every artery in his body constricted with guilt…there would have been a tight knot around his heart and his penis, flashing lights erupting behind his eyelids; there would have been wheels of fire, blacksmiths with eye patches, their red arms in molten metal, weaving a net so fine through which only time could escape…and in the bathroom he would have glimpsed, in the tiny aperture of his remaining moment of consciousness, the whole machinery of the Underworld.

On the Cook Highway we pass Carter Cordillion’s gold Mercedes speeding the other way. Do you know him very well? Blixen asks. Not very well, I say, but Blixen knows I’m lying. I wonder if I should tell her the truth about everything. Trade a secret for her secret. It may have been what Fabiana told Redvers just before he accidentally blew himself up with a stick of gelignite down by the waterhole on the Putty property – bits of his clothes were scattered all over the branches (the locals said it was a very windy day; gale force winds which may have provided static electricity in the air, causing a spark in the leg wires, which Redvers had not insulated) − it may have been what she said to him that made him go down there to try to blow a hole in the rock with his gel. After all, when the wind blows, the mad are distressed. ‘If a dead tree falls,’ Fabiana said to him, ‘and is wedged in the fork of another, you might just alter your perspective and not notice it. On the other hand, if you are obsessed with it, you’ve got to figure out how to fell it – at some personal risk.’

Anyway, that’s what the shop owner McCredie said.

Wood for the fire; grist to the mill. All stories are caught in the forks of others.

14

It was at the Temple Meridien resort some years ago, when I first moved up to Queensland, that I met Carter Cordillion. I was looking for a place for my surgery and ideally, a double-storey building so I would have a view of the sea over the gorse. Carter was walking across the lobby with a hand outstretched, a palm which was remarkably soft, though he was quite rugged in appearance, and he was unshaven, dressed in his immaculate Armani suit, saying: ‘It sure is a pleasure meeting you…’ in what I believed to be an Irish accent, but which turned out to be transatlantic. It was a good meeting. Cordillion was true to his word and I picked up some promising real estate, since the Temple Meridien resort was at the far end of town on the paved concourse, my property only two houses along from it, on a small dirt road. Cordillion said mine would become the best street in the area, and as the second property facing the beach, the architecture of which he described as Caribbean tropical vernacular, my pavilion home would make a good business investment. Especially since the present occupant had had remote-controlled windows installed and the Italian Saturnia marble floors laid by real artisans. Carter liked my idea of doing the clinical business down in the old cottage and enjoying an unfettered private existence up the slope. Only the best patients would come to you, he said. Then he asked me all about toxicology.

It was during my second meeting with him that he introduced his wife Janet to me. We met for dinner at the Poseidon Bar. Janet had taken too much sun and glowed like a radium dial, destined for a cancer ward. Her dyed ash-blonde hair and bottomless blue eyes interlaced with crow’s-feet gave her the appearance of an alien. She and Cordillion didn’t seem as if they were ‘together’. She hardly spoke except when we talked about reef sports. She invited me out on their cruiser and suggested para-gliding and underwater activities. I made a feeble excuse. Flying and diving were unnatural for humans. Carter guffawed, loosened his tie and before I knew what he was doing, had his hand on my knee under the long tablecloth. I had on my moiré skirt. It was a cold hand and I didn’t shift my leg. He let it lie there like a dead fish and then pinched at my stocking with little minnow gestures. I just wanted to see how far he would go. He didn’t. When Janet looked uncomfortable enough he brought his hand back up onto the table. There was a pulse which kept throbbing in the vein in his neck. This diastolic moment dilates the heart. The systolic contracts it. One extends and dissipates the body, sluicing it with blood. The other contracts the body in order for it to build force and escape from itself. Carter was trying to flee his own body. On his fifth visit to my surgery, he wanted some advice on sexually transmitted diseases. I sent him for a blood test, but not before he insisted on my examining his penis. I was not interested in such suggestions, unless there was some medical connection. But let me write this differently on his card. His mentula, as Montaigne would have put it, was swollen. I thought of my marine research: Ascidia mentula: predominantly occurring on the upper faces of circalittoral bedrock with little tidal flow. It has a rather barren, pink appearance due to grazing pressure from sea urchins. Cordillion’s member displayed signs of contusions caused by ligatures.

Time also has a diastole and a systole, like a water clock; the dilation of a drop when it gathers momentum is followed by its contraction and dissipation when it splatters. The pressure and pleasure of my moment with Blixen was bound to be shattered. While I was attending to Carter, I saw his bronzed, towheaded son outside in the waiting room, engaging in an animated conversation with her, and she was excited, fawning, smiling just a little too much, looking just a little too young and pretty.

Grafting

I am a drifter. I work by association; sleights of hand; petty theft. I have always lived this way, and have been caught out only a few times. You learn from being caught; it makes you cleverer on the next occasion. I’ve found out that she is a doctor, the dark one, with a successful practice in town. Dr Judith Sarraute. Her network of associations is a very interesting one: high-flyers, resort owners, developers; the big end of a very small town. Of course they are hardly ever there. Seasonal people. Like me.

To graft: to insert a graft into a branch or stem of another tree; to propagate by insertion; to implant. I suppose Dr Judith Sarraute has done some surgical implanting in her time. On the hotel internet I discovered something about a bungled sex-change operation. Sarraute was not the chief surgeon. She returned to being a GP after that. Fled Sydney. My profession, however, may be an even older one than surgery. For centuries they have been taking twigs from ancient trees, grafting them onto younger ones. My associations go back to Adam. We branch out; we connect and proliferate…sometimes to no end.

I sit in this restaurant drinking sweet wine and study the hybrid rose they have in a vase on the table. The sun shines with a metallic glare and the sea is sick, heaving, dirty green. I notice these things because my survival depends on noticing. The white tablecloth burns my eyes and the fried fish I have eaten layers the emptiness with bones. There is hardly anyone in the restaurant and that spells trouble for me. It means I will have to leave when the waiter goes to the kitchen; slip out the side between the heavy plastic which they’ve let down to break the salt wind ruffling the tablecloths, knocking over the roses. A gold Mercedes cruises the waterfront. I recognise the heavy build of the driver; the five o’clock shadow on his cheeks, the slouch to one side, the way he works the wheel with one hand. I’ve seen him park at Cairns airport. On a connecting flight between Sydney and Los Angeles (I was stopping in Sydney, mingling with transit passengers…you never know what kind of duty-free you can collect from under seats on sleepy stopovers), I saw him embracing a woman. He was holding shopping bags in both hands. She looked like a porn star, dressed in a short golden chiffon skirt, leopard skin tights, black top with much cleavage. There was something about her that wasn’t right. For a brief second, I looked again…it’s not good for me to stare, not in my line of business. But there was something strange that stood out. I couldn’t be sure about the woman part of her. It was as if it had been grafted on. But then what do I know? I have to stay pallid, wallflowery, in order not to be noticed. It never pays to be too analytical. It’s hard work, going with the flow.

The word ‘work’ is the original meaning of ‘graft’. But the meaning has slipped, deteriorated. One root has been corrupted, one branch rotted. I still consider it a trade, a craft. But look what they’ve done with it: scammer, sharper, chiseller, swindler, gouger, clip artist, con artist, beguiler, cheater, deceiver, trickster, slicker, welsher. People who use these words forget one thing: we are all codes and copies, melting, merging. Look at this DNA map they’ve just produced. I found it in a catalogue. They tell me you can buy it at a huge price, the litmus paper dissolving beneath your microscope into key molecules from which you can distinguish double helices, twin spiral staircases of life, mortal coils. It’s strange, but I’ve always felt cheated by science, by scientific people. None of their results benefitted me; they did not make me happy beyond the three seconds or so of happiness I enjoyed every six months. I’m like the fishbones on my plate…left behind, fossilised…dead fish eyes won’t be seeing rainbows out there over the sea…in school I learned human skin colour comes from rainbows…it changes when seen through a prism…was it Mendel or Mendelssohn who discovered the chromatic scales? My brief forays into amphetamines have ruined my memory. I think I’m alone; singular. But really, I’m born to look like someone else. In my brief forays into sex I’ve often had the bored concentration of a barramundi in a drying billabong… beyond help…foggy…staring with fried cataracts at the harsh light of the tropics which turned a graft into an open sore, thinking how we loved one another because we were blind…oops, there he is, Cordillion, looking like a TV weatherman, coming into the restaurant, checking the sky through his mirror sunglasses…flesh, all too fleshy…How are you? Good. How’s Janet? I will ask him. He’ll try to flip through his mental Rolodex… Who the hell are you?…I will make the observation that it wasn’t Janet at the airport, the woman with whom he took the flight to LA, that he may want to pay for my meal…and another bottle of the Sancerre. But I think better of it, say nothing, and slip out through the side, briefly parting the plastic, my cheeks stinging with salt.

15

Chinese art is non-representational, I was saying to Blixen as we lay on our banana lounges on the lawn in front of the beach. We have been working fifteen-hour days at the surgery and finally tourists have got the message about stingers. Now we are taking a day off, relaxing in front of the Pacific Palisades watching the water turn pink with coral spawn. Blixen was speaking about the Conceição paintings. Ancient Chinese art, I continued my lecture, was not about realism, nor about the copying of reality, which is really a kind of trickery, if you think deeply enough about it…you know, the discovery of perspective destroyed narrative and emotion, I was saying to Blixen, who was not listening at all, her dreamy eyes wandering all over the beach, waiting to catch a glimpse of Travis, the Cordillion boy, who any moment now would saunter up rubbing his abdominal muscles with its protruding navel, smiling behind his shades and Blixen would melt into embarrassment…for God’s sake, she’s twenty-four, it’s as though she’s never had a date with a six-pack, spending all her life studying and sipping atrocious coffee with bespectacled nerds at the university. Perspective made you melancholic, I was saying, it put you at a distance, and you suffered from being at one remove, never arriving, but always being held by the vanishing point. Well, there’s such a lot Blixen doesn’t know about, and I guess I have to let her go find out herself.

It’s not as though she didn’t know about her mother Fabiana, who was always looking for adventure in men with whom she shouldn’t have become intimate…she was incapable of detaching her eyes, anxious she would not be admired…sleeping with her neighbour’s boyfriend, so that what’s her name… Miranda, yes, that was it, flew into a frenzy of rage and jealousy and fired guns up at the house in Putty, and it was not as though Blixen didn’t know about Fabiana’s increasing instability, her obsession with her analyst and with hourglasses and with Brazilian boys who ran dodgy nightclubs, guitar players who helped her grow marijuana on the patch of land cleared inside a pine forest, where she stored drugs in a silo protected by dogs… where she watched time like a cat watched goldfish. It’s not as though Blixen was entirely innocent about me either, since she already knew of my career at the North Sydney clinic where I did sex-change operations and that I had given it up when I was convinced it destroyed too many lives. It’s not as though I hadn’t written about how it was better to have left trannies in two minds rather than to be implanted and grafted, forever dissatisfied and forever to be pumped full of drugs until the body’s hormones revolted and flesh fell into fat, shape into silicone, all melting like a Bacon painting into lonely grief, paranoid schizophrenia; suicide…It’s not as though Blixen had been sheltered from all these things…from her father’s investments in coastal property, his dealings with shady financiers, so that when he died, much of it passed on to her. He was her hero. Of course Blixen hadn’t gone through Redvers’ writings since she found the latter’s literary style impenetrable and therefore would not have read that chapter in Brief Lives (II), where, without any need for allegory or subterfuge, he outlined the venal motives of his friend Walter Gottlieb, criticising the latter’s need to ‘divine’ fame for himself, exploiting rumour, buying the public’s belief that he had been let into a secret, when all the time he had been stealing his, Redvers’ stories…so Redvers said…adding that he, Redvers, was a descendant of the Portuguese poet Camilo Conceição… Redvers, who was always broke; Redvers, who envied his erstwhile friend, mentor and benefactor Walter Gottlieb; Redvers, who wrote that beautiful elegy for Blimunde. No, Blixen didn’t know about Redvers and me.

But I wasn’t going to say this to her. Not while she was infatuated with Travis. Just as I wasn’t going to remind her that at the age of fifteen, after a weekend in Putty, she had run back to her father Walter Gottlieb and had tried to encircle his thick waist with her thin arms. He didn’t hug back. He never did.

Slide #3: Tripedalia Fabiana

The bell reaches 14 mm across and has many warty mammilations containing nematocysts. There is little information on the Tripedalia species. Wait for the sting. (Buddhist monks ring a bell; hit one another to keep concentration.)

I wouldn’t go so far as ever to insinuate to Blixen that her mother was a murderer. No, Fabiana was simply trying to get Gottlieb to leave Marie, trying to get him to live with her, the love of her life, the father of her children; she would have killed for him even though she would have betrayed him a hundred times. But Gottlieb wasn’t going to leave the luxury of his existence, the preciousness of his harbourside poetics, the weekly reading group to which he now belonged…and most of all, the safety of Marie, because he was through with risk, through with selfdoubt, with the insecurity of faith, hope and love.

That’s the romantic version.

The gossip in the forest was that Roger the parquetier found out how much the ‘Chinese’ paintings were worth. He exploited Fabiana’s naïveté and took possession of the works, in order, as he said, ‘to put a value on them’. He met up with Marie de Nerval in Double Bay. The first thing he said was that his wife was cheating on him. He wanted those damned paintings catalogued. He intimated that divorce would be a messy business and that he was a simple man. He hired a private detective named Levine. Redvers told me all this. The third version, my dear Blixen, I cannot repeat to you. Redvers said your mother was a complete narcissist.

16

– Jude, who was Redvers?

– A drifter who lived on your mother’s farm; a ghost, a phantom.

– Did he die there?

– Well, he disappeared, Blixen. Just like Roger. No one knows what happened to Redvers. He suffered from fugues. He said there were always thirty of them in one’s lifetime. I think he was a melancholic; a sad fellow. He was always trying to live up to the myth that he was a great painter. He went everywhere on his bicycle; always appeared at moments when secrets were about to be revealed.

– What is a fugue exactly? Not that I’m going to specialise in psychiatry.

– Sufferers usually had two alternating personalities; a kind of double consciousness. Doctors first discovered these cases in 1885, in Bordeaux. Then in the 1880s gleaners, tramps and vagabonds discovered the ‘safety’ bicycle and an epidemic of fugueurs was reported. It was a kind of pathological tourism. Economy class. They terrified pedestrians, these manic travellers, poor workers for the most part, who did not appear out of nowhere. They had history on their side. They were stuck to their bikes in their ‘other’ state like former knights on their horses. They had eminence and precedence. Melancholic artisans without access to any nobility. Driven to movement, not humility. Three centuries earlier, Michel de Montaigne, the essayist and nobleman, was similarly obsessed about dying upon his horse whilst on his travels in the 1580s.

– Wasn’t he the mayor of Bordeaux?

I play a CD of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. I’m trying to understand Blixen’s mother. How a talented woman like Fabiana followed such a devastating path in life. She did not have any self-esteem, Blixen said. Blixen in the bath, taking her time, wringing out her long blonde hair. Variation No. 26. I listen to Glenn Gould’s historic 1955 debut recording. Taking his time. You can hear the pedals being pressed and released. The resonating aftertones. Bach’s key changes indicate some form of destiny…Bach speaking deeply to himself as though he had no real will, only questions about God’s harmony in the disharmony of the world…God’s voice, Gould’s touch. I listen to Glenn Gould’s 1981 recording of the same Goldberg Variation he played in a concert in 1955. It is much longer. This time there is a haunted humming as well. He’s an older man now, enjoying his mastery and his argument. His voice adds another conversation. He’s not there for others. It’s no longer a disagreement with God, but a kind of resigned abnormality, as though being a detective in these solitary fugues needed indifference and cruelty. I can hear Blixen humming along. Her cheating voice doubling Gould’s. She’s going to have a summer affair with Travis Cordillion. I said this aloud, irritated at myself for having been so unproductive in my research, for not being able to read the future. Ever since Blixen’s arrival, ever since the epidemic, I have not discovered a single thing beneath the microscope. Squiggling molecules. I haven’t given enough time to considerations of beauty, having spent much of it in cynical observation. What did you say? Blixen asks; she’s come out of her bath, looking divine, wrapped in towels.

17

The relentless blue of the sky. The endless thudding of the small waves on the sand; the green water churning over masses of white jelly. The queues of patients and the smell of their vinegar baths prefigure a crucifixion. Someone must be sacrificed. On the horizon you can see the kite rising, hovering…Janet Cordillion, suspended there beyond the reef where there were few stingers… too cold, too dark in the water for them. She flies, towed behind her cruiser. The cruiser is a present from Carter. I think she has orgasms up there, Carter told me over a crab salad. He was drinking a whole bottle of late-picked Riesling by himself. I don’t disapprove of people drinking at lunch, especially when I make them sign what is necessary. How’s Samantha? I ask. He looks at me and takes a minute to think. He told me about Samantha. He’s crazy about her. She’s fine, he says finally. I’m the one you ought to be thinking about. It’s okay, I say. You’ll get the results by next week. I can’t…he begins…I won’t be able to…you know, with Sam. Not if you’re responsible, I tell him. He looks over the papers for the Rastoni again. It’s all in order. I wanted a sixmonth option, an instalment plan. He signs. If you speak to Angus Cattle my solicitor, we can lay off staff tomorrow, I tell him. They’ll have no trouble finding other jobs. The stingers haven’t put off all the tourists. They come here to be social, to party. They prefer to swim in the pools anyway, I say to him. You know, Cordillion mumbles, preoccupied with something entirely different, Sam’s not sure about the operation. Then she shouldn’t have it, I say…I’d seen pre-ops at suicidal pitch because they’d taken too many hormones.

I’m watching Janet out there on the reef and I’m depressed by her loneliness. All sky and sea, all alone except for the cargo ships swollen with fuel oil, fat to the Plimsoll line, smoking up and down the coast, threading the Grafton Passage and the Trinity Opening between the reefs, ploughing up dark blue water. Why doesn’t Janet want to know about Carter and Sam? Samantha, I think to myself, was beautiful…I’d only met her once. She was cute, slim and dark, wearing black lace and stockings, sitting on a cane chair, winner of the Singapore Transgender beauty contest. The room sparked with camera flashes. She was electric, a mix of cultures, like the cocktails she liked to drink. The risk was not in the operation, I said. I wanted Carter to be aware of this. Men were the real danger. In the end men always killed abnormality. Carter was silent. At the moment he may have thought he was in love. There will be a time when such feelings will vanish; when he will become confused and not understand a single thing about dysphoria.

I said this to him again in his lounge room when he and Janet invited me to talk about some share options he was offering in his multiplex organisation. Janet was in the kitchen at the time, making tidbits, caviar on biscuits which seemed to lack all imagination. Carter wasn’t really sensitive to my warnings. He was lighting a cigarette. Do you mind? It’s your house, I said. He stubbed it out, but the damage was done. My warnings increased his self-loathing. We argued about Sam without mentioning her name. I said her participation in these anti-pageants was a need for recognition, a risky procedure. I tried to point out the huge pain of being born with a body that was opposed to one’s mind. It was wretchedness generated by an identity crisis, not, as Carter thought, a sexual come-on. His house was dark, billowing with curtains. Outside, a blind God was still blowing jellyfish ashore.

18

My father, the professor of tropical medicine, had the best collection of venom in the world. In his laboratories in Paris, he had two large coolrooms filled with compression shelves in which he stored venin and poisons from all over the globe: everything from funnel-web toxins and snake venom to deadly nightshade. When I was twelve…the age at which he said I had become a woman, he gave me the key to his rooms. I walked among the shelves. On one side, the dull transparency of death appearing harmless as saliva; on the other, colourful antivenenes. He taught me all the properties of blood. I observed: coagulants; corpuscles; my father making love to an assistant. Sticky components. Contortions. I learned to extract venom from cobras, blood from human veins. A boomslang snake, I noticed, went into contortions after biting something, presumably out of excess aggression and the need to generate more venom. Then it would grow tired and you could pick it up by the tail. I always worked backwards, picking things up by the tail. My rear up in the air. My father with his large hands around my waist as I bent my eye to the microscope. Even though I hated my childhood, I respected the privilege of having the key to such things.

19

Blixen no longer rides with me to Mossman and back. She’s always complaining of tiredness. I wanted her to send some blood samples to the pathology lab before the week was over. I went on long randonnées with the over-fifties club, though they were much too slow for me. On these group rides I heard all the gossip. Cordillion wanted to build a casino up the coast. Janet, they informed me, was riding up front, showing off. He’s off to Africa next week. Who? Carter of course. He’s always off somewhere. It’s all very unhappy for her.

Blixen doesn’t show up at the surgery that often now. She stays out, presumably with Travis. Passed into another’s life. Comes home late, goes to her own room, sleeps until midday. I don’t like my stepmother behaviour. I don’t like staying up waiting. I don’t like suspicion or fantasy. I don’t speculate on scenarios. I have cold showers. I am punctual and methodical.

I have inherited my father’s collection of poisons and antivenins, though these are more for the sake of historical data on aggression and stress in animals. Every now and again surgeons in the field of gender reassignment call on me to clarify the problems of hormonal reaction to surgical stress – any incision is an aggression upon the body. But my real interest is not in these areas of stress and anaesthesia, but in the psychosis patients develop after being bitten or stung. Over the years, I’ve built up my own collection of venom and anti-poisons, which I house in a Chinese teak cabinet, locked for obvious reasons. Downstairs in the surgery there is a steel safe for dangerous drugs. Collecting is contiguity: one item placed next to another without real meaning. All that matters is that there is a kind of ‘system’…an alarm clock which calls decadence to assembly. Look, these moments of my life: this phial in which I have preserved toxins discharged by Irukandji jellyfish, painstakingly extracted from the microscopic strings of pearls along hundreds of tentacles. Books too, can be necklaces saturated with poisons…Zola’s Thérèse Raquin, in which almost everybody dies, a damp copy of which is beside the bath Blixen has just used. Among her underwear, her father’s rosary beads.

20

I catch myself acting like a stepmother with Blixen and step-mothers are not naturally good. I look at Blixen’s slim body, her blonde ponytail, her lazy athleticism, the way she walks on the balls of her feet in her pink Converses, and she matches Travis Cordillion, in height and lightness. Though give him a few more years and he will turn to fat with his beer, as they all do, driving his car too fast on a winding road. Blixen left the door of the steel drug safe open. It was carelessness I could not overlook. That kind of thing could get me struck off, I said. She laughed, though she could see I was serious and gave me that look which said I was a little old and stuffy. As a stepmother I am too bleak. I take a bit more time with Travis. I am patient, entrusting him with courier work, transporting samples to the lab. Carter says enforced idleness is not good for his son. Because of the stingers, Travis hasn’t been conducting his diving tours out on the reef. I’ve seen him staring at me, watching me in my pink lycra, straddling my bike on the concourse as I ease out into my ride, past the grifter, who’s stealing glances in my direction, and with all this staring I want to sprint…an itch that will become furious, a fast-twitch muscle ticking in my mind, deluded about my erotic authority, angry with Blixen for having left dangerous drugs unlocked. There it was, wide open for any addict. Luckily, nothing was missing.

My cycling is a recycling of the body. Getting everything to work is in fact anti-aesthetic, since beauty doesn’t produce discipline, and discipline doesn’t produce beauty, but being in motion is vertiginous and seductive. There is nothing to be revealed about a body. To assume a body is simply to care for its needs…to be a custodian of its duration while it memorises its pathways. After my exercise I shower and find myself hardened, my thighs more powerful, my breasts pouting in defiance. I have had many suitors in my time, but I have not had enough time to consider them, those men who cannot understand anything I say, as I cannot speak ordinarily, though I am intent on conveying ordinary things like the weather, and each time the suitor would end up feeling cheated, as if I were mocking what he had to say, mocking his defensiveness, his submission even, and it would be left to me to puzzle over what I said that was wrong; the slight tone of supercilious dismissal, the mildest indication of scorn. Now in my fifties, I have been pegged at thirty-five, but I don’t spend time worrying over appearances. There is Travis observing me again and I can see him considering his Blixen (for surely I have given him Blixen? I have given her to him as a gift only to know her better, for her unfaithfulness to him will increase my propriety over her), measuring the girl against the older woman, thinking a thought with his body which puts his mind under stress, a clearly painful curiosity. And as I pedal along the coast road I feel the heat rising up from below, the same heat that Travis will now feel under him on the sand at the far end of the beach and next to him Blixen will be turning over in her black string bikini so that the sheen of the material over her backside, appearing under patches of wet sand which have slipped off as she turned, blinds him momentarily with desire, as though a landscape had subtly eroded and revealed not a woman next to him but the emptiness of the memory of his father’s mistress…a memory of Samantha, always immaculately dressed, slowly peeling open his astonishment as she rose up in the escalator, this encounter in a department store in Sydney, his father stammering behind, making small talk, introducing her as a business associate though it seemed obvious to Travis she knew nothing about his father’s businesses, and now as Travis looks across at Blixen he will be encountering something different…suddenly she is without mystery and he will not be patient, resulting in Blixen’s abrupt departure, flinging her towel around herself, having sensed his distraction, believing it was I who had displayed myself too readily on my bike, mistaking the I who could not have distracted him…I, who lifted my rear into the air, who could have had no interest in him except to remind him of worlds which may not have existed and which formed an idea beyond him.

21

Blixen returns before I am able to finish my ride. I guessed that she would, when Travis looked that way at me. The work of the female nude in paintings over the ages confirms the fact that posture and poise, point and pose, sublimate defects…which then return as disturbances. Blixen returns, is unsettled, begins to drink early. I sense this already, out on my ride, and I turn around at twenty-five kilometres; make my way back. I find her lounging, disgruntled, moody, snapping like a turtle. I soothe her without words, massaging her back, rubbing her feet. I carry her to the bath, which I’ve filled with oils and calm her down. My surgery is also a repair shop, unguent, perfumed with care. Mindful of how much I can administer, aware that soap runs out as it did for my father, I leave Blixen to soak. Downstairs, in the surgery, I wipe my forearms with surgical pads soaked in alcohol. I look out the window and expect Janet Cordillion to fall out of the sky onto the line of the horizon, the oil tanker providing a smokescreen. It’s a battle on the Coral Sea.

Stung patients have not stopped turning up at my door. Those that have already been treated, return with side effects: some patients have severe pain in their backs but anaphylaxis has not yet occurred. Pre-treatment with adrenaline may have prevented their mild bronchospasms. I am irritated at myself for having missed these contraindications. I notice that I have been forgetful lately, leaving lights on, my car keys stuck in the boot, bills that I have paid twice. I am overworked, but I have also exercised excessively. All this I have called The Blixen Effect. She reflects me in my worst light; perhaps it is my increasing intake of alcohol which she encourages, bringing back all sorts of exotic recipes for cocktails so that at the end of a long day it is almost impossible not to slide into a sort of coma, and then she will bring out the make-up that she has gathered, all the mascara, rouges, lipsticks and we will paint each other in drunken barbarism, faces dotted like island chieftains, this epidermal pointillism resembling nematocysts on the tentacles of jellyfish, each dot a copy, a plague of dots replicated to achieve the overall result of ferocious abnormality when viewed up close, but which appears at a distance as a benign and camouflaged uniformity.

22

Cordillion was optimistic in his report to his consortium. He was wrong. The Chamber of Commerce noted that tourist numbers had been declining; sales of luxury apartments and houses had almost come to a standstill, though their prices still hadn’t dropped. Commercial fishermen are out of work, restaurants have reported fewer customers, boat owners have started to sell up. I renegotiated the price of the Rastoni with Carter. He backed off and then agreed to lower it. Renovators would start work on the gallery immediately. It was a small infusion of business confidence. Every little bit helped.

The stinger season has almost come to its end, but jellyfish are still thick in the water and people complain of feeling nauseous when they go out in boats, as though the masses of jelly increased the pitch and yaw of boats, made the water heavier, prolonged the swell and slowed the waves, and a viscous blubber was now forming beneath them, and even on shore they feel its pull dwelling at the bottom of their bellies and they cannot eat, any slight smell of cooking oil sending them out into the courtyards, beachfronts, parking lots, retching, heaving, vomiting. The pharmacy is inundated with customers. Travis brings me the pathology reports and hangs around in reception, but Blixen does not appear. I try to encourage Travis to go home. He’s shaved his head. It’s made him aggressive. I don’t like him observing things through the open door of the surgery when there is a break between patients, hoping to catch sight of Blixen. It’s as though he’s become too familiar. Yet I feel that if his presence was missing, Blixen would pack up and go back to Sydney. She has found his persistence flattering. She has booked a room for a week at a lodge in the Daintree, a room overlooking a waterfall. It would be a good break for her, as she hasn’t really had one since coming up here, but it would mean I would have no help in the surgery. She didn’t want me to mention anything to Travis.

Alone, in a dry bath. I sit there feeling the contours as if she had been there; for a week, the insulting blue outside, the offensive glare and sheen of bright sand and in my dry bath, fully clothed, I brighten and darken my windows to achieve the effects of cities, seasons and sounds, the lamplights frosted with green, heralding the coming of spring in the Place Vendôme near my childhood apartments, the brown waters of the Seine in flood during autumn, the glow from the stoves of the chestnut vendors at night, shouts from the illuminated haze above the Parc des Princes during the six-day bike races. But the light here is unrelenting, unmodulated. Almost antiseptic, it conceals a monotony which induces a pressing need to wander, to break out; an irrestible, purposeless need to travel as erratically as possible. It isn’t something that is obvious or general until it is named. The bath fugue may still have its day in the Australian sun. Free to wander without imprisonment or punishment. Up there in the Daintree forest, Blixen is sitting in her bath trying to hear the waterfall. Down below, there are no jellyfish; the water in the river is cold and fresh. She plunges into it from her balcony. I hope she understands form; measurement; the depth of the water before the rocky bottom rises up.

When Gottlieb told me about Fabiana during an unguarded moment in my surgery in Double Bay, I made it a point to visit her shop. Women have an instinct for allies. Fabiana invited me to her spring, her waterhole, to swim one windy summer’s day. But down by the water there was no breeze since it was shielded by willows and the waterhole was in a depression, cut off from the wind, calm as an oasis. There, Fabiana, who was in a psychotic state as she often was, told me that we were being watched, by whom, she didn’t wish to say. The story of the spring was true, she said. What story? I hadn’t heard of it, I explained to her. Oh, everyone around here knows. The mystery of Roger’s disappearance. It was true, she said, that her husband, who had begun life as a parquetier, a floorer, if you like, had bought the Putty property from the Grace family, the last of which was a surviving male, to whom the place had been passed. Roger had bought it back for her, his beloved Fabiana. It was true, Fabiana said, that Roger had gone out to fight that bushfire by himself and that the water tanker had dodgy brakes and somehow, while making the trip between the waterhole and the forest fire, the truck had disengaged and rolled into the flames. It was true that Roger’s body was never found. But as you know, there are a whole lot of subterranean rivers and springs out here and in the past, cavers had come, asking permission to dive, which I’ve always refused, Fabiana said with a sigh, since it was too dangerous. It was I who told the police that Roger may have sought relief from the heat of the fire by plunging into the spring and had somehow been dragged down by reeds, into the strange and unmapped apertures beneath. It was true that the police sent down divers, but were incredulous that any human body could have slipped into those small crevices, let alone be sucked through them into subterrenean caves. Fabiana then told me something that she had not told anyone before. She said that she thought Redvers was in love with her. He thought he could solve her mystery by widening an aperture with a stick of gelignite.

One death was an accident; two was carelessness; three would have been intention. Gottlieb pre-empted that. To be tortured by Fabiana would have been agonising. I know. I’ve met her. It was much worse than being tortured by guilt. My dry bath provides me with a memory. I had written on Redvers’ card that he was a fugueur. He needed to travel for no particular reason. Always riding his bicycle. If someone had said to Redvers: Don’t try to be a detective, you can’t possibly ever be one; or if someone shouted at him: Look, you’re stirring up the dogs with that crazy behaviour, you have cyclic automatism; or if they simply said: Stop acting on hunches, you’re just sleepwalking and dreaming in circles; then Redvers might have survived, simply through knowing how he appeared, how he was named. Once classified, he might have watched himself; fictionised a normal existence.

23

Slide #4 Chironex Cyclops

You have to read Redvers backwards. The reason why he claimed your confidence was that he only had one sighted eye, and that with an optical nerve at the wrong angle. The other was blinded by a stone thrown up from a car while he was riding his bicycle in India. It made him an extraordinary badminton player. He learned all the best strokes in Delhi; all the acutely angled, unreachable, unreturnable shuttlecocks geometrically calculated to perfection, flights of impossibility. He could glide from one side of the court to the other without being seen. But this made him obsessively one-eyed and saturnine because he couldn’t see himself. It didn’t enlarge his understanding of others.

The huntress Diana spent much time by a river washing and hunting. She never ate the animals she killed. She donated her catch to the Cyclops, industrious slaves who served her. Her extraordinary skill was to convince the Cyclops that they were the masters, captors of an Amazon, carrying her from her bath dripping wet, laying her on silk sheets to be ravished at will. But in reality they were held captive by her; by her muscles, her power, her deadly aim. Her victims watched themselves being caught in the trap of a never-to-be-satisfied desire. They grew thin in her cage, fretting, fragmenting, thinking all the while of the impossible freedom to fuck her. It was because they were oneeyed. I without the You. Unable to think as someone else, they could only guess at perspective. Jason Redvers had chosen to die rather than to have surgery. His prostate had metastasised. He told me the fig had dried. It’s like a rule in rugby, he said. Use it or lose it. He ran a high fever the last time he came to me so I put him in a bath of ice. He said his grandfather was a poet who wrote verses in a tub, reciting one from his Water Clock series entitled ‘Perspectiva.’

24

It has grown dark outside. I must have fallen asleep, still in my clothes, but something has woken me; a sound from the bedroom? Nothing. I get up out of the bath, turn on all the lights. The air conditioning is humming soothingly, the sensor lights on the alarm pad indicate it is only my presence in the room. More body heat and mass than my own would have sent the system pulsing with loud beeps before a full alarm. I check all the doors, go down to the surgery and test the system. Ring the security service to report a trial, not a break-in. I go back up, undress, decide to take a real bath. I let it fill slowly and while undoing my silk organza gown, I pass my hands over my breasts, looking for any irregularity, performing my secret rites, squeezing my thighs together, feeling the ropes in my muscles, transformed, from Diana to Aphrodite. I do not touch myself down there. The steam is soft and golden as I negotiate my way to erasing any original sin.

I have fallen asleep a second time. It is deeper and more peaceful than before and when I wake it has been an hour or more by the little clepsydra I keep over the spa and I feel a little groggy watching the little cupid with his arrow rising up in time to mark the water that has passed. I recall a phrase from a strange dream in which I walked out the back door and saw Travis Cordillion clambering up a sand dune as though sand had been building up behind the house and now he was sprinting and I couldn’t even make the first few steps without falling back and he was saying something muffled, telling me there was somebody left behind…passengers…it sounded like he was saying a passenger had been left behind on the reef and it must have been something I was reading in the papers the other day, when a diving party failed to account for all the passengers on a boat out near Wallaby Reef and returned to shore and it was five hours before they realised that two were missing. The fear of not being missed. I thought of Janet Cordillion and at that moment I woke again, and my previous waking was only a dream of waking, and I realise how tired I must have been. Taking a bath rather than showering has been a new experience, enervating and tinged with dissatisfaction, causing me difficult dreams. I am confused, not knowing whether I dreamt someone had been in the house, or whether there was a real presence and I am annoyed and irritated by the checks I still have to do. Had not I done it all before? It is late. The Chinese cabinet swings out its carved wooden doors as I pass. That teak cabinet in which I keep my collection of venoms and antivenoms has been unlocked, the key which used to be on my keyring left inside. Its wooden doors flap uselessly against the sides. My heart leaps. I feel violated, raped through my own negligence. The rows of bottles are regular. I cannot tell if some phials are missing. I will have to take an inventory, fudge it if there has been a theft. All this carelessness has been my fault. Lack of vigilance. Inadvertence. I will not be able to report it, to state that I was in the bath, in the process of erasing original sin, not hearing anything.

I rush out onto the balcony. To the left, several cars are cruising slowly on the Esplanade, their lights dimmed. Passengers. Are there any passengers in them? In my dopey state, still clad in my organza gown, wearing my black booties with the white lace cuffs, I do not know whether I was dreaming when I caught sight of a car towing what looked like Cordillion’s speedboat. I know the boat, the one Janet used on the reef before it dragged her further aloft – Cordillion’s speedboat, which was shaped like a swordfish with the name Passionjuice painted in purple on its side. I don’t know. All speedboats look alike to me.

Implant

They’ve grafted a little microchip under the skin near my heart. It keeps me going after the bypass. I’m like an old car stalled on a slip lane; the motor needs a few turns, a few coughs, before things get unblocked. At night I lie on my mattress in the caravan I’ve rented and listen to the sea, and my heart beats irregularly and all that arrhythmia makes me cough… just a slight cough, though a persistent one, and that is bad for business. As a drifter, I risk being noticed. I shadow Doctor Sarraute. My ‘I’ hides in the shadow cast by hers.

There’s that Cordillion boy dragging his jet ski up the coast where the stingers aren’t that numerous. I’ve never understood how the rich play…how they can never really relax without doing the next deal…the deal is the play. I don’t know why the Cordillion boy always takes the inland route up the coast. Why he always stops off at Butchers Hill at an old house on the Peninsula Road before going cross-country to the Cedar Bay National Park where he launches his jet ski at night.

A lot of the pines here have been transplanted. Just up the beach on the other side of the national park is a military area, off limits to all. I have been to the fence where there are signs warning of ‘live firing’, and ‘unexploded shells’. A row of yellow buoys are strung out in a line across the water threatening straying craft with fines for trespass. During the day, sunbathers speak with American accents. I step silently over the cones and needles and watch the calm sea. There is no moon, so I light the lantern I bought at the markets. Perhaps I will see jellyfish rising to the surface. Perhaps that’s why Travis Cordillion goes surf-skiing on moonless nights past the nets and marker buoys, where he doesn’t have to plough through jelly. The pine branches wobble as I part them, tensile, like aircraft wings in turbulence. They’ve planted more pines to keep the dunes in place. To transplant: to dibble, inoculate, vaccinate. A surgeon is also a gardener, grafting parts onto wholes. A Caligari.

Protection. That’s the doctor’s job. She doesn’t know about me. My friend Ross, the cook at the Rastoni, has lost his job. Without him, I have very few good meals that are free of risk. Ross complains to me at the markets on Saturdays. They’ve gutted the Rastoni, and soon it will turn into an art gallery, with high walls and embedded lights. Graft, implant, embed, bury. Maybe that’s what the good doctor is doing. That’s what Travis is doing when he comes back on his burping jet ski. Burrowing. I blow out the flame in my lamp just in time. The pines have shielded me. Travis is burying something he retrieved from a small boat. He does all this in pitch darkness, squatting on the ground, hacking away with his army trench tool. Then suddenly, as if warned by a sound, he looks up, straight at me, though I’m sure he cannot see me behind the branches, and he picks up everything and comes in my direction, holding the trench tool in one hand, and I back away with a silence that comes naturally to me and when I regain the track, run in the opposite direction from the carpark. I’m good at such evaporation, but I’ve left my lantern behind. My chest aches; I know this pain. The microchip does not like visible and physical risk and it is letting me know.

25

I’m afraid there has been a break-in at the surgery, I was saying to Blixen when she returned from the Daintree. I had been waiting three days to say this to her. She looked alarmed. More panic than was necessary. Her first words were: Did you inform the police? Not: What was taken? This gave me the cue to lie. It was her scurrying which set me off. Yes, I said, and there is an on-going investigation. Her face turned pale and she bit her lower lip and this was a gesture of hers I knew was brought on by guilt and I sat her down on the lounge. Blixen, I said, when I was twelve my father gave me the key to his room of poisons, entrusting me with the responsibility which came with knowledge. It’s the essence of all learning: to use what is known to reach the unknown responsibly. The fact that you left the key inside the cabinet demonstrates part of that responsibility. You wanted it known that it was an inside job. There are only two of us, Blixen. She undid the clasp on her ponytail and smoothed back her hair and then tied it up again. This too, was a gesture of guilt, stage two: the point at which she is found out. Blixen is a moral creature, and it is an admirable quality to have for a doctor. You knew it was me? she asked, nodding as she said it, reinforcing the affirmative. The alarm system records my body mass, I said. Unless Travis lost forty kilos, it could not have been him. I will trade you one piece of information for another. This is not a gift. Somebody with a serious heart condition came to see me at the surgery yesterday. This person observed some of Travis’s activities. I presume you didn’t see him up at the Daintree during your week there? She shook her head. Leant back in the lounge so her small breasts were defined through her silk top. She was exhaling heavily. Blixen never wore a bra. I don’t know why I held this against her. I was more angry with this non-wearing of bras than with the fact that she broke into my cabinet. I felt like saying this was why Travis stared so much at me, imagining the satin and lace bra I wore, even under my cycling jersey. I withheld my full breasts from his gaze, I was going to say to Blixen. I imprisoned my breasts because of their unnatural size and their acorn nipples. I was like the Muslim woman who came to save her son from the effects of Irukandji stingers. She was not concerned with politeness. There was a lot of strength in that. In her hijab; in her flowing abaya. Without seduction. One of my patients, I continued, implanted the thought in my mind. What thought? Blixen looked angry and horrified. Travis is a drug runner. He picks up sunken contraband. He does more than diving for a living.

It took some time before Blixen spoke. He was trying to make some money to help his father, she said. I’m sorry, I explained to her, I don’t quite understand. The afternoon outside my windows had broken into a grey squall massing on the horizon. Soon patients will be queuing in reception. My evening regulars: the middle-aged women with sinus problems caused by low pressure and humidity; the jellyfish victims no longer boisterous with bravado. Sometimes the wind turns everyone anxious. It seems, Blixen said, Carter got into difficulties in Africa…

I didn’t urge her to say more, because this is the way I was brought up by my father. You neither urge nor encourage. They soon tell all. My father was not urged to make statements he later regretted, first about the Aryan status of his wife, then about the Vichy régime. It was he who forced the Kahnweiler to close in 1943, writing an article in the Croix de Fer newsletter about the gallery’s ‘decadent turn’. No, one’s urges should be one’s own and one should take full responsibility for them. I suggested Blixen take a hot bath. In it, she let me rub her back. I pointed out significant moles and asked her to take notice, have them checked. I did not mention her fair skin. How she looked just like a younger version of Fabiana. She should spike up her hair with gel; immerse herself in the balm of things past.

Difficulties in Africa…the rich indulge in deliberate wastage, I was about to say, when Blixen informed me she was giving up medicine to join a Buddhist convent. I didn’t tell her she was throwing everything away. I didn’t say what a mad idea I thought that was, that the rich indulge in deliberate wastage, that they let themselves be carried away by a rip-tide, that the Nerval-Gottlieb fortune should be squandered on a child who could have been a Schweitzer, but who chose to push prayer wheels and chant mantras to child gods. I did not say anything when Blixen told me she was turning over all her paintings…inherited from her great-grandmother Julia Grace…turning over all of them to me, to kick off the launch of the Kahnweiler Gallery, in a stunning exhibition of old and new, in a vernissage unseen in this country, attended by dignitaries and art lovers from all over the world.

Blixen had an unstable lineage. Someone will have to pay; someone will be sacrificed. I retreated from the bathroom. Maybe she was missing Blimunde, ‘connecting’ with her. The twinning theory never worked for me. She was escaping from malevolent time…giving away her legacy; her inheritance of guilt.

26

Slide #5 Carukia Fabiana

On the other side of her family, the tearaway Fabiana. You can imagine: fine hair ruffling in the harbour breeze. The twins. Blixen came first and she averted her eyes from the baby; could not bear to look at what had been inside her, the demons of Gemini…was there something from Siam as well, a message? The child was trying to attach, imprint, find its mother, its unfocused eyes roving, folding back. Then the second. Blimunde. She looked. It was all right. They were not joined. The doctors were right. How clear to her that she cared about normalcy! How she cared. Then came a dark cloud and it settled on the mother’s face. There was no hormonal rush, no spurting breast. She could not give any more. All had been taken away from her. And now, so were her babies.

Years later, Levine’s be-ringed fingers. He had grown old with addiction, thin and dark. Levine, the North Sydney dealer and private investigator…whom Gottlieb tried to imitate in a grotesque and ludicrous pantomime, was rubbing his fingers over her unproductive nipples. Levine drove a big car. You couldn’t imagine Gottlieb in a pink Chev. Or maybe you could, his hair flying in the wind while discoursing on Hegel. But Sol Levine, whose jealousy ran his reason, produced a razor in his hand and held it to Fabiana’s jugular. Have there been any children? From me? You better come clean, girlie…if I’m whacked I need to have them in the will. She knew Levine was broke. She hired Sergio for protection and let out her silos to itinerants and went nowhere without her pack of dogs. It was only a matter of time before Levine called on her again, following an ageing cyclist from a Newtown nightclub. Levine drove out to Putty in his pink Chevrolet. It was just a matter of luck for her that Redvers had his accident that day, and when Levine heard the explosion coming from the waterhole, he legged it to his car, only to find it gone. He hitched a ride on a semitrailer and disappeared in Sydney. Six months later, Fabiana left for Rio. From there, a third country with no extradition treaty. She bequeathed Barringila to Blixen, and it was there that Blixen wanted to retire to her Buddhism and meditation. She would build an ashram out of the ruins. You could imagine all the ghosts. Maybe incense would cure the air and chanting would drown out the voices, ream out all the skeletons from hollowed trees.

27

We came to this country with poisons, my father and I, after the suicide of my mother. Dr Sarraute (in Australia it rhymes with ‘carrot’), crated his whole collection and had it shipped under refrigeration. When the right technology came along, he told me, this will be like gold dust. It was the sixties, when France ran with recriminations, revisions and revisitations of what one’s father did during the Occupation. The Algerian war exploded lives for all to see in the newspapers. Was my father a collaborator? Did he save my Jewish mother by erasing her past? He knew about DNA. Undoubtedly, as the journalists pointed out, he didn’t rescue her. He wrote letters to powerful friends. He was careful not to incriminate himself. This was cause to be reviled. Nor did he save himself; neither with his champagne baths nor his determination to forget, wandering off to other countries to find a tropical hideaway. He died in Fiji while I was in medical school in Sydney, of a rare blood disease. I kept a sample of his blood in my industrial fridge, building on the micro-array of codes documented in his deoxyribonucleic acid. I found toxins in the mitochondria. At the university they called me a vamp. Vampire, to make it clear. Not flattering. A blood expert. Blood orange, they also called me: My black hair of which I was ashamed, which I had dyed red, still left a white streak.

Carter Cordillion’s pathology report turned up today. My receptionist rang and left a message for him. He didn’t call back. Blixen was making preparations to build an ashram at Putty. The Kahnweiler Gallery was starting to look like a real art gallery, with a spiral staircase in the centre of the ground floor, circling up through permanent artworks to a space above for current exhibitions. Carter didn’t press me for payment of my instalments. Instead, he sent me a note, written shakily on what felt like papyrus. He would brook no discussion. He wanted me to have lunch aboard his cruiser on Tuesday. If I didn’t turn up he would rescind the property deal.

That morning Janet was not skimming the horizon, hanging from her Chinese kite. The tanker was nowhere to be seen. It was an absolutely blank day, a glazed, layered painting of grey lines with a filigree of dark tentacles where a tropical storm was brewing. I walked down to the jetty. I was about half an hour late. Carter’s cruiser, with its exhausts curdling the water, its transom bubbling like a cauldron, bobbed slowly beside the jetty. Mounds of jellyfish rode the swell astern. He saw me walking up and came out from the bridge to greet me. He had a shadow on his cheeks…that wry, defeated smile which said we had once been intimate and that I had not played the game. He held my arm and helped me aboard and then let his hand linger for a brief moment. Although the day was not hot, his palm was sweating. The aft deck was set up with a table and chairs, wine glasses, ice buckets and a basket of prawns. He said butterfish was on the menu. He offered me pink champagne, which I refused. He asked me to unhitch the bowline and he eased the boat out into the glassy cove. I was slightly nauseous. In about ten minutes we were near the reef. Carter showed me where we could glide over the coral, where it was colourful and shallow, without jellyfish, and then he took the boat out into the blue, serious water. Before we dine, he said, what’s the prognosis?

The water became rougher and when I told him he looked away from me to the stern and nodded as though he had expected this news all along and it seemed he had suddenly aged ten years, his shoulders slumping and his cheeks sagging, a look which I had seen on others when I pronounced a death sentence, and you just have to observe their reactions, make sure they don’t turn suicidal or hysterical, but most of the time they are resigned, and Carter was even looking a little happy, relieved, knowing he had less than two months to live, because the toxins had caused the cells in his blood to revolt, caused them to die inside his veins, and he was already dead, and knowing this was like jettisoning the lifebuoy, any hope which had been weighing him down…it was the worst thing, hope. But now all the fight had gone out of him, and there was peace, and even a need to square one’s conscience, reveal what one had spent one’s lifetime concealing, the rapacity that had been driving him from the moment he was born, naturally enough staving off hunger and despair, but which had killed any empathy, anything other than material wealth, so now he didn’t quite understand this sudden need to be human, why now, why this moment to look inward? The fear of not being missed. There was nothing much inside. I asked him where Janet was, why she was not para-sailing and he looked at me in an almost aggressive manner and then smiled and said she was at home, but he was distracted and gunned the motor so the boat slipped from the crest of a wave and began to bounce and slump, spreading more foam from its stern.

I wasn’t in Africa, Carter said after a while. I think I knew that already. Everything bad Carter contracted came out of Africa, but I took that to mean a place he shouldn’t have gone. I went to Los Angeles, he said, with Sam, and she took me out to an African snake farm where they had hundreds of varieties of poisonous serpents and she was learning how to milk them and make them harmless for a short time because she needed to dance with a boomslang coiled in her bosom…it was for a floorshow in Vegas…and the snake-keepers, they had a fancy name, herpetologists, warned her the common tree viper from sub-Saharan Africa was an extremely dangerous, greenish-brown snake, delivering a potent hemotoxic venom with its folded fangs. Sam always liked extreme risk, Carter said. She was going to read out all the snake information at the beauty pageant and then produce the reptile and allow it to nestle between her breasts. She had been bitten many times by other snakes and some of the poisons sent her into a sexual frenzy, she said, and I stupidly volunteered to be first to be bitten by a milked boomslang, what the heck, maybe some of this snake venom would drive out all my other viruses, I figured. Well, it all went horribly wrong. I thought I could hold the snake in a trance. They gave me an anti-venom serum but I was allergic to it and then I had to have blood transfusions and chased ambulances all over California, finding doctors willing to diagnose me, washing out bad blood, getting a high each time they stuck the needle in.

You’re a fool Carter, I said. I couldn’t help feeling sorry for saying it, but he smiled and said he was committed to death and he was sorry he asked Blixen to get him more poison and the dear girl brought him morphine. You trained her well, he said flicking a cigarette he didn’t light into the sea. He was pushing on the throttle handle and the boat lifted its nose and he was making for a tanker which had appeared unnoticed by me, on our right, blowing black smoke, and I thought for a moment he was going to crash the boat beneath the ship’s rusty bow, readying myself to leap out, but he was warning it to sail further away from the reef. Damn pilot’s asleep, he said and blew the cruiser’s klaxon and then stepped out on deck to wave the ship back into the inner shipping route and a seaman on the bridge waved back, mistaking it all for some drunken game rich white guys got up to in this part of the world. Then Carter was on his radio and he was calling REEFREP, to report dangerous shipping and the radio crackled and I wondered if I would survive all this heroism and finally I said to him I’d like to go ashore now, and I think I disappointed him by not wanting anything to eat and only accepting a glass of mineral water, a bottle of which he reluctantly dragged out of the fridge. Carter poured himself a whisky and threw the prawns overboard and was back to his old self, making sure the cruiser was docking safely in the marina, fussing over hawsers and buffers. On the jetty he handed me a manila envelope. The gallery is yours, he said.

Graffiti

It means inscription; claw; scratch. They found those in the ruins of Pompeii. Ash-embalmed victims in the act of scrawling their names on the walls. They wanted to be named, to be known in death. Make their mark. Kids have already painted graffiti on the ochre walls of the Kahnweiler Gallery in Rim Cove. They’ve drawn huge penises. This is an old practice. In the sixteenth century Montaigne complained of this penis desire, three times as extravagant, he emphasised, chalked on the walls of the great houses. I’ve got a casual day job with the Council scrubbing off graffiti with a high-pressure steam hose. I didn’t give my real name. Graves, Robert. ‘Grave-’ – to dig, inscribe. I once worked for the Council digging graves. Whenever I’m short of money, the Council is a good bet for some day labour. I’ve got a name on all the lists, copied from gravestones. Graft. It’s worth following up.

I guess I can always hold this journal over until I work out a way of getting a reward for it. One has to do this carefully. I don’t know what Dr Sarraute would do to get this back. She shouldn’t be using confidential patient information like this. I could maybe copy something from it to show that it is authentic and that my interest in helping return it is genuine. Graft – a pencil-shaped shoot. That’s all I possess. Graft and no boodle.

There was no moon that night when I went out to the pine trees again, on the edge of the promontory in the national park at Cedar Bay. I thought I was dreaming that night when I saw Travis Cordillion burying something in the sand and now I was trying to find the spot, see if there was a trace of his digging, but there was nothing, just empty beer bottles left by amateur fishermen; burnt driftwood where they tried to start a fire and gave up, as driftwood is hard to burn unless you gather it further inland, and out on the reef there was a light which wasn’t moving. A tanker? Dropping off another load of drugs, weighed and marked by crayfish buoys which Travis would pick up? But the light wasn’t moving. I stepped back behind the pines. Sat down on the needles and watched for more than an hour. These narrow channels through the reefs are dangerous for shipping. The Messiah will enter through an aperture. Every day I dream of a catastrophe, which will install a new time. That is the grifter’s salvation: that things will not be the same again. I heard the familiar burp of the jet ski. It was coughing and spluttering and it seemed that Travis was having some trouble. He waded ashore and dragged it onto the sand. Backed his trailer up. It wasn’t Travis. In the dim light of the cabin console I caught a glimpse of a face. It was a black man. Perhaps someone wearing a balaclava. He took off without lights and bounced dangerously over the verge. I walked down to the water’s edge, very slowly, just in case he decided to return. The water was black. The fact that there was no moon made it all the more sinister. I took off my sandshoes and tested my fear. Amorphous, elemental sea. It buoyed me up. The water was warm, heavy, with a coating on it. My feet came away black. The tanker I was watching had run aground on the reef and was leaking a massive amount of fuel oil.

28

When Dr Judith Sarraute looked out her surgery window that morning, she could not see anybody para-sailing on the horizon. There was a sharp glare coming off the water and she observed an oily sheen on it which made her nauseous. The tanker was still aground on the reef and it would take several hours while the tugs waited for the tide before it could be towed out to sea. The incident had already made all the national news bulletins and it was reported that Rim Cove developments would take huge losses. There were no fish in the sea. And now an oil spill.

Towards the late afternoon they pulled the tanker off. The bay was ringed with lines of booms. Volunteers were spraying detergent on the beaches. It would take weeks, they said, for everything to return to normal. It was almost evening; martini hour in lounges and bars in normal times. The sky had turned a steely blue. The tourists had gone. Dr Sarraute stirred her drink on her balcony. She only had three patients today. One case of haemorrhoids; a woman with an ingrown toenail; Mickey Jones wanting Viagra, sitting there smiling slyly beneath his beret. It was just upon sunset when they found Carter Cordillion’s body entangled in prawning nets. They called the only doctor on duty. They had a floater, the policeman said to Judith over the phone.

When she looked at Carter’s body he had no face left. She saw bloated meat, a Francis Bacon study, a white object, grotesque and bland, in conformity with what appeared to be a human body, swathed in black fuel oil and wrapped in netting. She studied it with the disinterest she had applied during her years of surgery, matching appearance with reality when bodies crossed over. Yes, she confirmed it was Cordillion…the telltale tattoo inside the left thigh which he and Sam decided to get on a night out in Bangkok. She said they would have to phone for a forensic pathologist. They would have to transport the body to Cairns. The tall policeman, the one with a head that looked too small for his body, wanted to know if they should Glad-Wrap the corpse. He’s marinated, but not in extra-virgin, he said.

29

It had been a thirty-day epidemic and now the stingers were gone. The oil had blocked out their light, Judith Sarraute was saying to Blixen Gottlieb when she saw the latter off at the small Cairns airport where they were swabbed for explosives before they could get a drink. They talked about how foreign tourists were putting up shrines in the shower sheds to ward off future plagues. Carter Cordillion had committed suicide, Judith was saying. She was quite certain. There were other client details she could not speak about, but Blixen knew most of those anyway. As the call came for boarding they hugged, and then the older woman whispered in the other’s ear that all dirt dissolved in soap. The coast would be cleaned and the fish would return. One simply had to be observant, single-eyed, ambitious. The moment of understanding would come. The younger woman nodded. I’m sorry about breaking into the morphine safe, she said. Judith Sarraute shook her head: I’m just glad you’re finishing your studies. You’ll see that little by little your flights will diminish. It’s a bit like a thirty-day epidemic. Sooner or later fugues resolved themselves. They only had a limited range, a small number of octaves; they were made for portable harpsichords and clavichords. Sooner or later they returned to where they began. And then you will discover yourself outside yourself.

30

How much do you think a grifter could get for a doctor’s notes? And who is asking this question?

Egress

To shoot: to depart, to get away; shoot through.

Landscapes, seascapes; they all overwhelm me. I don’t know why, but they come upon me with great sadness, a tree-lined corner here, a track leading to a windswept lookout, a public garden. They all possess a bittersweetness, like an old suppurating wound. It was because I was not busy that I suffered. I experienced the suffering of others, became engulfed by their sadness, suffocated by the lives I thought they lived. It was my own projection. They were not in the least disturbed by their lives, not in the least affected by landscapes and seascapes, save for some banal marvelling at nature.

It had been a couple of years now since I’d come down to Rim Cove. The place had been dead a while and then revived. No more oil spills. The authorities didn’t allow tankers anywhere near the reef and they’d forced them out into deep-sea lanes. Stingers come and go in their season, drifting like me, and at the Ocean Temple bar they even have a cocktail called a Stinger, and you see that couple over in the corner? Well…just imagine…he’s passing his hand over hers and they gaze into each other’s eyes and soon they will go upstairs, and in their room they will draw the curtains and he will feel the need for speed, but will refrain, everything tending towards significance as though in a dream, but the dream is fractured by their anxiety, the dark glass reflecting light from their single florid lampshade. Same old story. Each move is the end of something, yet moving towards something they don’t yet believe can end. He addresses her breasts, undresses her a little, his hands like butterflies. Showtime. Wait. I remember it now. It was years ago. I had picked up a stray credit card. Followed them to their room. The same girl. The same strangeness about her. The way she seemed to have been grafted. He runs back the curtains with the remote control. The fulllength windows bathed in nightlight and sea salt. She is translucent. Arms akimbo. I had brushed the large cash tip he left for the waiter into my pocket. I paid for my drink and left the bar with his camera slung over my shoulder. I walked past the security chap in the black suit. As a rule, I do that early in the morning and often during the day. I make my way to the sand where wooden tables wait for lonely observers, night owls framed by their own investigator’s eye, and I click away up at the window with a telephoto lens…you never know, the return of flow… love’s rhythms all but lost…my digital instrument automatically sharp in the darkness and in the glimmer of brief light, old light, I could have sworn it was him; the property developer with the mirror sunglasses. There are no simple stories; the wind comes up; I pull my lumberjacket around myself and smell my odour; I’ve not bathed for days, though the sea is warm and clear of nasty cubozoans. I return to my caravan for the night and rap on the tinny side of my neighbour’s rig for him to turn down his country-and-western music. I cannot abide sentimental ballads. I swear I’ve also seen that she-male before.

Morning. I have just bathed in the pristine sea. I am free from threat. Salted with vitality. The world, my oyster. A subtle change in wind signifies a change in season, which passes virtually unnoticed at this latitude. A sea bath always turns me inside out. I am wide open; stretching to the horizon. Clean. There are no jellyfish; no fish at all. The mayor of Rim Cove is accusing the military of causing this calamity. Janet Cordillion was quoted in the local paper, claiming that toxins draining into the groundwater and the sea from the base have mutated species and produced fish which cannot spawn. Inland, feral pigs are dying in their hundreds. The northerly wind is said to be deadly for children in the Indigenous community next to the test area.

I stroll over to the Kahnweiler Gallery to have a look at the exhibition called ‘The Culture of the Copy’. Chinese paintings which they cannot quite assess as ‘originals’. Some are copies, done by apprentices. Others unknown; perhaps masterpieces. This is how a culture is passed on. The copied text becomes known through the soul of the copier, since he has to traverse the terrain it commands. A bequest from some woman artist who was famous in the 1930s has left the nation this collection. It bears the thumbprint of the Chinese copier. I read up on all this before I went to the Kahnweiler opening a year or so ago, in case someone engaged me in conversation. No one did. I hardly ever participated in conversation since I have lived alone for many years and am happy with my reclusive life. I did not know who Julia Grace was. There was no food at the ‘vernissage’. Not even finger food. Just plenty of bubbly which I drank to excess. Rolled out the door last and got to plant a small kiss on the cheek of the somewhat puzzled Dr Sarraute, who didn’t know why there was this intimacy between us. This display of touching and affection and breaking cover is not what I normally do. Retreating, I palliated my appearance. I am bland, believe me; beige; instantly erased from memory; a correction of the work of being born. You are?…My life has always been thus, getting by on the fiction of first names. I slide into the slender recesses of a system card. Three lines cover me. I take pride in never having worked for more than two consecutive days. Judith brushed back the white lick in her hair and asked if I could help carry out the crates of empty bottles. Outside, the misty night. She was distracted, still trying to recall my face, confused by crowds of copies, as if her numerous patients had turned impatient, all wanting to be recognised with the same face. The eternal return of the same. Some people kill to be different. She’s frowning. Something in her unconscious. The unconscious always wants you to be found out. It lays out its traps: scattered on the wind, liquefied in rain, revealed by sunlight. She opened a door with a key. In the packing room I realised how Judith had made her money…by an epidemic of diagnoses. In the packing-room, boxes upon boxes of her patient records. She was disturbed. By the fog… by me…by names.

The Kahnweiler Gallery. It sits on the other side of the road which runs through the resort town, so that if you stand on the beach you can see it directly behind, on a green hill surrounded by date palms. On the left, facing the reef would be the peninsula upon which Cordillion built his mansion and his ritzy estate. To the right is Sarraute’s surgery. The gallery is at the fourth point where you box the compass. A cubic stinger. They say Cordillion gave the doctor the site and the building. For her services to epidemiology. ‘Gratis’. That is my name for today. It’s better than ‘Graves’. Cordillion was a philanthropist. The rumour was he was bonking her on his cruiser.

The Kahnweiler Gallery is sad, melancholic, built out of white stone with dark teak window frames, and it has large dark green doors and there is a courtyard in the middle of it, sprouting deep palms, so that it appears like a colonial mansion in Singapore or Macau. I can vouch for the architecture: a great copy of imperial construction; the edifice of edification. I ride up to it upon my bicycle, a grey aluminium racer I found abandoned at the local tip. On it, I am almost invisible. As I approach, the gallery looms large in my anxiety, although it remains hidden and squat behind the palms, a hum emanating from it, for it must sit on the matrix of a powerful electricity grid. The whole site is completely floodlit at night. A northerly wind is blowing strongly.

Enter. It is very cool inside and the slate floors hold tight patches of sunlight which warm the soles of my feet. Today I am dressed between an ageing hippie and a food writer: loose cream shirt and three-quarter length beachcomber trousers. Beige canvas shoes. Almost colourless. Entry, I noted, was free. On this level, around the courtyard, there is pottery and sculpture, which I find to be mostly primitive, naïve art about which I know nothing, but at least I know what I like, though that is probably not the best way to approach art. A roomful of ceramics by Ångström. Wasn’t he the founder of spectroscopy? I have Judith Sarraute’s journal in my khaki canvas bag and I intend to leave the leather-bound volume on a bench, on one of the padded seats in the Julia Grace gallery, the one on the second floor featuring Australian modernist paintings, where someone else will find it and not knowing to whom it belonged, may just return it to the front desk. Bach fugues flow from the sound system. Perhaps I will leave the diary in the bookstore, where others will read it, try to purchase it, along with a volume on Giacometti, his sculptures photographed at the Victorian State Gallery…here, a shot of them being admired by a short rotund fellow looking like Alfred Hitchcock; there, a beautiful, tall girl in black lace with her back to the camera. My life is premised upon such juxtapositions and coincidences. Suddenly, an aria piped through the speakers. One should bypass arias. Here on the first floor, the Chinese paintings. They seem to be curated according to the weather. A gentle breeze on a lake here and there, and at the other end of the wall, an overcast, windy landscape, trees bent in the direction of hills. Then a misty sequence, starting in a valley where gnarled tree-trunks stretch into foggy mountains; tracks which lead to a promontory lashed by rain. There is hardly any sunlight. No perspective. These are landscapes from pre-history, representing a region after a catastrophe, craggy peaks about to topple. Everything hangs in defiance of gravity; suspended because reiterated, repeated and contrapuntal. That is how the eye reads. It reminds me of something I was taught at school: too close to depiction and distance is pierced. My pacing from one picture to another, my walking…retreating and approaching…changes all perspective. Perspective is a sentence. ‘I’; ‘you’. The pleasure of observing a grifter comes from a glimpse of his escape. Through slight variations, he comes to be accepted as the return of the same, as in a fugue…he’s an earlymorning riser; an express checkout; a noonday stroller; a late-diner…too close to depiction. At the moment of his disappearance, at the vanishing point, there is a distrust of the eye. Gravity-defying, he leaves…nothing. Off to somewhere off-limits and without limits.

I walk on. This section is on poster art. Look here. A whole series advertising Chinese bicycles. These must have been the original designs, done in oil on canvas. Two scantily clad women advertising ‘Sa-Bei’ brand cigarettes while riding their ‘Forever’ bicycles; here’s one with a girl in red silk and mink stole, her left breast fully visible, ‘The Wu-Xi silk company: apparel for women cyclists’; and this one called ‘The Sitting Monk’. He is squatting amongst seven semi-naked women leaning on their bicycles. It’s for a calming medicine. Beneath the paint could be an original landscape from the Sung Dynasty, or vice versa, it all could be one gigantic sting…or chance…I was convinced there was a painting that would tell me all of this.

These little rooms inhibit strolling. A gallery should have rooms which follow one another in a straight line, so one does not have to turn corners suddenly. All of the art can be seen from a distance, in motion, forming and reforming according to one’s arrival and departure, as in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, where one could view a Soutine two hundred feet away, and if you squinted, whole new worlds appeared, parallel universes, the skeletal structure of each painting visible in its embalmed death, smells of despair trapped in paint, a renaissance of putrid meat, then if you head south towards the Van Goghs you experience a similarly purulent frenzy, distempered dripping, a deep shimmering in the noonday heat, hear the falling water of the wash-shed where there were once hissing vipers and upon approach, the sunflowers would grow, shine, wilt and finally melt into microbes before the guard reprimands you for nosing too closely.

And so to the contemporary…the somewhat present. The air is cooler here back on the bottom floor. This seems to be where the interest lies… I count four couples and some art students in front of the Francis Bacon; pretty girls in sarongs sitting on the floor sketching. This room has an informality about it…an untidy aspect that comes with boldness, strong colours, fleshy montages. Nothing very interesting except for a portrait of a girl in a cane bathchair in black lace, her beautiful legs crossed, with long dark hair and wide smile, innocent, somewhat disabled in her thinness…and I notice it formed the beginning of a series that had once been hung for the Archibald Prize, portraits of celebrities, though of course celebrity is something I stay well away from and have never been curious about people who have achieved it, so I do not know many of these names. I step over the art students to get a closer look at the little cards on which is information about the artist and the subject and I spend more time looking at these cards than at the paintings themselves, feeling that I can hide up close, peering at the text rather than standing back in the spotlight of colours spewing from the canvases…and at the end, at the very end of the exhibition, there is a small portrait, done on squared paper, a scientific study…all this time I have not missed the strange quiet, the polite silence which no one has noticed, but now there is a murmur of what seems like discontent, a desperate argument kept at very low decibels, the kind of silent disagreement one often finds among spouses in art galleries when one partner, out of the need to assert an opinion, cannot wait patiently before breaking the silence like a familiar fart, uprooting an old argument that had been germinating beneath for all those marital years, and the whole round begins again, a murmur ending at the wall at the end of the corridor leaving behind half-expressed frustrations, nasty games, and I wonder what had provoked all this and I walk up to the scientific study on squared paper to get a closer look at the controversy and here I am, hunched over it, hearing the sound of a toilet flushing behind the wall, wanting to poke at this portrait, wanting to find out why it caused such disagreement amongst ordinary townspeople, this painting of a…of a surgically masked woman holding up in her gloved hand a jellyfish which, when stared at long enough, resembles a man’s head, the translucent tentacles of the jellyfish hanging down like dreadlocks, and in her other hand, a scalpel…as though receiving her applause like a violinist at the end of a difficult fugue, as if waiting for the bearded, severed head to answer, speak up, tell the truth. Her eyes alight, allconsuming…they speak of her secrecy, the purdah of this jelly-like thing… behind which was her strength, her oath, this anti-memory, this silent reproduction of deadly codes which had given her both life and fame.

To disappear behind a mask, beneath the surface of things. He slid over the waxed floor and the art students shifted uncomfortably and they looked at one another for they had only felt a slight breeze, as if nought but a ghost had passed between them and as he made his way towards the exit the bored guard noticed a shadow that had zigzagged…everyone was disturbed, it seemed, by that portrait – it gave them vertigo – the way it was set at a slant, skewed, the fact that the woman’s left eye was missing… and the shade stopped by the gallery shop to purchase the reproduction, yes, the one entitled ‘Judith and Holofernes’, yes, that one, by Redvers, and yes, that’ll be on credit…